Aquatic Health Net

AquaticHealth.net (www.AquaticHealth.net) — a free open-source intelligence gathering and analysis network for aquatic animal diseases.

Gathering, storing, sharing and analysing information on the health status of aquatic animals — including finfish, molluscs and crustaceans — around the world presents a particular challenge. Official reporting of pests and diseases in these species, and unofficial reports in the media or in systems such as ProMED (see: http://www.promedmail.org/), do not feature as prominently as, for example, reports of outbreaks in people or animals such as cattle (e.g. foot-and-mouth disease) or poultry (e.g. H5N1 avian influenza or ‘bird flu’). Geoff Grossel and Mike Nunn in the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) recognised this gap and worked with Aidan Lyon and Mark Burgman of the Australian Centre of Excellence in Risk Analysis (ACERA) to develop an innovative information technology solution that has dramatically improved the capacity for intelligence-gathering and analysis in aquatic animal health: AquaticHealth.net (see: http://www.AquaticHealth.net).

The team developed a system for searching internet sites worldwide and collating all information available on aquatic animal diseases and signals, such as market prices, that can give early warning of outbreaks occurring. The system automatically removes duplicates and collates all relevant reports into a summary that an analyst can quickly scan each day. The daily summary keeps critical information such as the location of outbreaks and enables geocoding and storage of detailed information on a world map for easy storage, retrieval and analysis of patterns and trends over time. The system offers the opportunity to share, store, collate and analyse open-source information on aquatic animal health. Users can easily focus and fine-tune the search system to their own specific areas of interest (e.g. by disease, host species or geographical location).

AquaticHealth.net gathers between 50 and 100 articles daily using a list of search terms entered by the intelligence community users. Of these, only about 10 articles are published and tagged by users as useful. Of the published reports, the system tags about 10 articles each week as ‘disease news’. Over time, this builds into a collection of information that enables analysts to identify and interpret emerging issues and trends. It can sometimes be difficult initially to determine what is relevant information, so the system archives all the data and information it gathers.

AquaticHealth.net includes a range of user-friendly tools such as search terms and tags, daily scans, published reports, maps, wikis, research news, industry news and RSS feeds. It automatically detects Through the wiki pages, users can edit and update entries on diseases and other topics related to aquatic animal health. Each wiki page about aquatic animal diseases also includes a forecasting section, in which users can make and debate forecasts of disease outbreaks that may affect aquatic industries. The system effectively ‘learns’ what is relevant from what information that is kept and published on the website, relying on users to decide what is relevant and what is not. This innovative approach of using a balance of programmed automation with the ‘wisdom of crowds’ underpins the system’s success.

The analysis identifies patterns and trends that can be used to forecast likely future events as input to strategic decision-making. One of the aims of building AquaticHealth.net was to lift planning horizons from three-day ‘reactive’ and three-month ‘tactical’ focus to a strategic one that explores what might be coming in the next 5–10 years. Analysts can determine what needs to be done now to be best prepared to meet these challenges — what is important is not ‘predicting’ what will happen, but being more prepared to engage with whatever may happen.

Emerging trends in aquatic animal diseases each six-months are collected and entered into the ‘emerging diseases’ wiki. A quarterly report is produced from the wiki and provided to various Australian government committees responsible for aquatic animal health. The report allows the committees to monitor potential emerging disease threats and to recommend response actions on significant issues as required.

AquaticHealth.net can be used to capture emerging disease information, analyse disease trends, map diseases, organise data, forecast disease events, provide biosecurity alerts, build biosecurity risk profiles and support decision-making relating to imports and exports. Some of the forecasting applications have already proven to be accurate and potentially very useful for improving biosecurity planning. The approach is now being extended to other areas where there is a similar lack of such capacity internationally, including plant health.