Using mobiles to promote awareness of One Health issues

Short, N. Royal Veterinary College; Hyde, B. University of Nottingham; Duggan, V. Royal Veterinary College; Karlsson, P. Royal Veterinary College

Recent developments in mobile technology have the potential to transform access to information and enhance sharing of knowledge. This will provide new opportunities in Africa to reach livestock producers who are often located in the more remote rural areas. This could be of particular benefit to health services when faced with new or emerging diseases where both animal and human health knowledge needs to be available on the frontline.

This post describes a project to develop a digital knowledge base of key One Health information for use in rural communities. This is based on existing work using basic smartphones in East Africa to map livestock disease outbreaks. The project aimed to identify the potential benefit of also using these phones to disseminate concise information related to both human and animal disease which can be viewed on various mobile platforms.

The digital information has been developed covering emerging and prevalent zoonotic diseases in the first instance. Basic “factoids” have been written in a format which can be viewed on a mobile phone. The intention is to translate these into local languages. Each factoid has links to more detailed information on WikiVet for users with internet access. There is also a facility to report GPS locations of cases.

The amalgamation of both veterinary and human health care in the One Health format represents not only an opportunity to improve livestock health, welfare and productivity, but also to reduce the vast number of zoonotic diseases which currently affect millions of people worldwide.

This is a copy of an abstract for a poster that we have submitted to the VetEd symposium taking place in Dublin in June 2013.