A Perspective on Applications of Geographical Information System (GIS): an Advanced Tracking Tool for Disease Surveillance and Monitoring in Veterinary Epidemiology

摘要

The spatio-temporal distribution patterns of most of the livestock diseases are complex. In this regard, the application of Geographical Information System (GIS) is valuable as it has many features that make it an ideal tool for use in animal disease surveillance, monitoring, prediction and control strategies. The GIS can store demographic information, etiological factors and prevalence records of diseases on a geographical setting, which enables a range of spatial analysis purposes. A GIS provides noteworthy additional value to the general purpose routine data that are perceived to be inadequate epidemiologically or for supervision purposes in veterinary profession, and noticeably increases the efficacy of networking and communication strategies. Descriptions of the dynamics of geographical diseases occurring from time to time and the risk / predisposing factors owing to spatial correlation along with sketching of risk and damage maps become realistic due to various applications of GIS. This gets reflected in cartography, neighborhood analysis, buffer generation, overlay and network analysis, three dimensional modeling, surface area distance calculation, and so on. The GIS may provide a momentum to disease reporting, recording, cluster analysis, modeling the spread of the infection, assessing outbreak situation, and planning control strategies, including disease prediction, vaccination, alerting authorities for preparedness, etc. With the advancement of GIS, mapping for the location of herds, flocks and other related facilities is possible, which proves to be helpful in management of disease outbreaks along with the improvement of management practices as well as veterinary service tasks during an emergency. Moreover, it can also be used as powerful tool to help various approaches being followed for preventing the spread of infectious and communicable diseases. This manuscript aims to bestow an overview of the promising and potential applications and usages of a Geographical Information System in Veterinary Epidemiology for advancing the knowledge of epidemiologists, diagnosticians, clinicians and researchers about this novel approach of disease surveillance, monitoring, prediction and control