A literature-based review was made to assess the applications of GIS in veterinary epidemiology and its relevance in the prevention and control of animal diseases.

Abstract

A literature-based review was made to assess the applications of GIS in veterinary epidemiology and its relevance in the prevention and control of animal diseases. GIS is “a powerful set of tools for collecting, retrieving, transforming, and displaying spatial data from the real world”. Overall, a GIS is a platform consisting of hardware, software, data, and people and encompasses a fundamental and universally applicable set of value-added tools for capturing, transforming, managing, analyzing, and presenting information that is geographically referenced. These data can be combined with population data and previous disease records for the prediction of diseases. Applications of GIS are very wide in all human activities. It is used for marketing studies, telecommunications, and the location of restaurants, museums, and hospitals; in tracking truck traffic; in establishing maps of animal population density by species or maps of changes in vegetation; in locating forests, rivers, and mountains and in determining soil compositions. The application of GIS to the veterinary field has been developed over the last decade. Specialized software is becoming more affordable and user friendly. GIS can be applied in veterinary epidemiology for investigation of complex disease problems, GIS is used for early warning systems, for recording and reporting disease information and for planning animal disease prevention and control program. One of the most useful functions of GIS in epidemiology is its utility in basic mapping. It is believed that GIS will play an important role in the control and eradication of epidemic Transboundary Animal Diseases (TADs). Thus training of veterinary staff on GIS, its tools, and applications are highly recommended.