Animal disease news system

Every year, a large number of notifiable animal diseases and notifiable animal diseases occur in Germany. The Animal Disease News System (TSN) was developed at the Institute of Epidemiology (IfE) in Wusterhausen in order to be able to evaluate these scientifically and effectively and to comply with national and international reporting requirements. Users of the TSN are the veterinary authorities in the districts, the Länder and the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV). Since 1995, the TSN has been used as a uniform electronic system for recording all notifiable animal diseases and, since 1997, also for reporting animal diseases. Since then, the TSN has been subject to a dynamic development process, with the continuous dialogue with users in the veterinary offices contributing to the gradual optimisation of data quality, functionality and user-friendliness. While TSN 1.0 was still conceived as a pure reporting system, modern Internet technologies, a geographical information system (GIS) and the first tools for effective crisis management were integrated in its second generation. The current version TSN 3.0 has now been significantly expanded among others in the following areas: 1.In the user management: For both components of TSN (TSN-Online and TSNVeterinäramt) it is now possible to assign tiered user rights by the TSN-delegating districts or countries respectively.2.In the reporting of animal diseases: The notification is now exclusively Internet-based using a secure transmission protocol, such as it is also used in Internet banking.3.In the newly developed crisis module: This means that veterinary offices now have an application at their disposal to plan and document all disease-related measures in the event of a disease, to keep an eye on the overall context and thus to carry out an efficient control of animal diseases.4.In the area of geographical information systems: the various functions of the Map Explorer have been expanded and optimised. New is, for example, the possibility to display the disease via Google Maps and Google Earth.