biosecHQ is a national technology platform for animal disease outbreak management and surveillance as well as a community portal for wildlife health carers.
It has evolved from eWHIS, currently deployed by the Australian Government (http://www.wildlifehealth.org.au).
The technology centralises a nationally valuable stream of real-time animal health information essential and unique to Australia's biosecurity surveillance program. Currently, the biosecHQ system forms the "ring of eyes" across Australia's landmass as 2000 of the 15,000 volunteer wildlife carers across Australia now enter the associated data, real-time, on the web.
When it comes to development a biosecurity surveillance and management system, the technology is only a fraction of the issue. Essential is having people across the nation prepared to voluntarily care for sick wildlife and enter their data in a timely manner. Through the creation of an online community, biosecHQ provides motivation for carers to participate as they draw a lot of personal value from using the system. No other biosecurity system attempts to harness the great value of these volunteers.
The development of biosecHQ has taken 4 years of consulting and development work with government and carer groups, learning the animal health domain, mitigating security risks, and developing and implementing the system via a phased approach.
Why is wildlife health critical to biosecurity surveillance?
Wildlife acts as a "canary in a coalmine" in terms of early warning of emerging disease or serious environmental poisoning. Over the last thirty years, more of the emerging diseases that threaten human health are coming from wild animals - up from around 50% to 80%. As wild animals fall outside most commercial activities, there has been little funding to build systems for tracking wild animal health. This is despite the risks which diseases such as Bird Flu or Foot and Mouth pose to human health and economic activities.
Traditionally, Australia has used its duck hunting community for surveillance of migratory bird health. But this has broken down due to drought and shortening hunting seasons ensuring fewer hunters are out there doing surveillance.
biosecHQ harnesses the year-round coverage provided by animal carers to fill this gap and provides a more consistent and broader type of animal health surveillance, enhanced with centralised standardised real-time reporting. Multiple levels and views of the database have been developed to handle both animal rescue and scientific information.
If you are interested in deploying biosecHQ within your national biosecurity surveillance program, please contact Curious Developments via info@curiousdevelopments.net