A Monitoring System for Transboundary Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) considering the Demographic Characteristics in Gairo, Tanzania

A Kijazi,S Kaijage,M Kisangiri,G Shirima

doi:10.48084/etasr.4140

Abstract

Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is present in many countries, including Tanzania. Gairo is among the districts that frequently face FMD. This study found that the current mechanism for communicating FMD in Gairo district suffers from a long chain of information flow that causes delay and insufficient information for FMD control. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the implementation of an information system named "Monitoring System for Transboundary Foot and Mouth Disease," developed purposely to provide a standard platform for communicating FMD between livestock keepers and other stakeholders in the district. The system enables timely sharing of FMD events such as outbreaks, precaution measures, clinical signs, and negative impacts using Short Message Services (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), and Voice Calls (robo-calls) through the mobile phones. Also, livestock keepers may report FMD outbreaks direct to the system using feature phones. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze data and Microsoft Visio was used for drawing the system architecture and information flow diagram. Finally, the system was implemented using PHP hypertext processor, JQuery, HTML, JSON, JavaScript, MySQL, and Apache webserver.

Highlights

Tanzania has the third largest livestock population in Africa, with 25 million cattle approximately contributing 7.4%In Tanzania, Gairo is among the districts that frequently face Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD)
The District Veterinary Officer (DVO) forwards the information to the Directorate of Veterinary Service (DVS) that has the mandate of uploading data to the Global Surveillance Systems
This study explores the implementation of an information system named Monitoring System for Transboundary Foot and Mouth Disease, which might reduce the communication barriers among livestock stakeholders in the district taking into account the livestock keepers' demographic characteristics

Summary

Introduction

Tanzania has the third largest livestock population in Africa, with 25 million cattle approximately contributing 7.4%In Tanzania, Gairo is among the districts that frequently face FMD. Some countries use surveillance systems for communicating animal disease outbreaks, which replace the paper-based reporting mechanism [9]. These information systems depend on the input data from veterinarians, laboratories, and other healthcare providers that act as primary sources of information [4, 10]. A few surveillance systems enable livestock keepers to report disease outbreaks directly to the system but failed to consider the education level and livestock keepers' demographic characteristics on the devices that are mandatory for accessing the system. The systems communicate the disease outbreaks, precaution measures, clinical signs, and negative impacts through websites, while livestock keepers lack skills and devices for browsing the internet [9,13]. Livestock keepers may access precaution measures, clinical signs, adverse effects, and transmission pathways of FMD at any time from the system through the USSD menu using their feature phones (Figure 4)

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Conclusion