Animal health and disease monitoring services
BPEX (a division of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board) is currently delivering a number of regional pig health improvement projects throughout England that is funded by the Regional Development Agencies. These pig health monitoring and improvement projects are supported by a number of online services developed by everysite.
These online pig health services are built on the BPEX CASI pig information platform which is used to operate the ZNCP scheme, the BPEX assurance checker and also the new eAML2 movement service. By linking BPEX’s health improvement systems to these other services producers and industry can benefit from a range of integrated and useful online tools. These pig health and disease monitoring tools include:
- Easy-to-use regional websites accessed via www.pighealth.org.uk where all farmers who wish to participate in the schemes can register
- A service to generate all of the relevant participation disclaimers and invite their vets to visit their units
- An online farm production profile including a “define my farm” tool which lets them position their farm on a map and draw around their farm boundary
- Once their farm is accurately plotted they can subscribe to disease alerts which will email them daily updates of any selected disease or production issues that crop up in their area
- A regional herd-health map which shows the density of health issues and specific cases within their region
- Dynamic online data collection – easy to set up questionnaires and surveys which can securely save information against a central BPEX farm record.
- Baseline vet surveys used to monitor disease status on farms
- A bio-security profile for a unit which can be used to generate multiple scores depending on the required analysis and risk criteria
- Vets can manage the units they visit and complete online surveys which trigger disease alerts provide information to be included on the regional maps
- BPEX have administration and management tools which allows them to link clusters of farmers together to participate in capital improvement, vaccination and depopulation exercises
- A national geospatial information system (GIS) which can plot any of BPEX’s health, production, and bio-security information. The service has already been used to provide density maps of herd health in Yorkshire and Humber and East Anglia. The system can be used by BPEX to identify clusters of disease and define areas of risk. The map is also linked to the UK assurance records and also the electronic animal movement information providing the potential for an affective industry disease tracking and monitoring services.