The populations of ASEAN countries are vulnerable to several major threats to their health posed by animal-borne diseases. The urgency of these threats has been proven by on-going outbreaks of Avian Flu as well as episodes of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which hit ASEAN during 2002”2003.

Methods for the management of Avian Flu and SARS are not yet fully developed as they are relatively new diseases. This makes contingency planning for the management of a major outbreak or pandemic a daunting task. One of the major challenges facing personnel in the health and agriculture sectors in making such preparations is maintaining fast and stable communication links with experts from around the world who will help in devising management protocols for these highly contagious diseases. These communication links must be capable of reaching quarantine zones which may be located in isolated rural areas lacking modern infrastructure such as telecommunications and electricity supply.     

ASEAN countries are at the same time giving priority attention to preventive measures. They include surveillance and monitoring programmes that aim to prevent small outbreaks of animal-borne diseases from spreading and developing into pandemics. Such prevention programmes must gather, process, and review a complex mix of wildlife, animal and human health surveillance data from across each country, and between neighbouring countries, so that specially trained wildlife, agriculture and human health personnel may be mobilized for on-site investigation of suspected outbreaks and activation of containment measures if they are confirmed. In all ASEAN countries, surveillance data for animal and human health tend to be processed and analysed by different ministries and government departments. The datasets are rarely merged and made available to policymakers as an integrated, national, human and animal health database.

The existing datasets, apart from being fragmented, also rarely plot them against geographic data, such as the location of water bodies, farms and human populations, all of which are significant for identifying vulnerabilities which need to be managed. In the case of avian flu it is water fowl, migrating along flyways linking water bodies, which infect other birds and poultry that eventually transmit the virus to humans. Therefore, the integration of geographic data with human, agriculture and wildlife data is highly desirable in creating a holistic surveillance database for animal-borne diseases.

New information and communication technology (ICT) offer tools and systems which are able to address these two inter-related problems. Their solution will make possible an integrated approach towards managing the threats posed by animal-borne diseases such as avian flu and SARS. The efficacy of ICT for such application has been proven in the recent outbreak of SARS in ASEAN, Hong Kong and Canada. The problem to be addressed in this project is the creation of integrated communication and information systems that will support national and regional efforts to prevent and control the spread of animal-borne diseases, and particularly Avian Flu.