A Novel Approach to Zoonotic Population Monitoring: The Zoonoses Integration Project

This paper describes the need for and the development of a multidisciplinary approach to situational awareness (SA) that incorporates a novel approach to monitoring and reporting zoonotic disease outbreaks. Zoonotic diseases comprise most of the pathogens that currently cause human disease and are potential bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease agents. Delays of various lengths can occur between initial diagnosis and reporting to local public health systems with traditional passive disease reporting. Animal reservoirs, vectors, and hosts create a multifaceted epidemiology. Environmental factors resulting from weather and geological events, human interactions, and habitat modifications affect the populations of animals within zoonotic disease chains of infection. The Zoonoses Integration Project (ZIP) was designed to be a component of a fusion center that assimilated public health studies, general media sources, and other sources to generate a daily SA report. Many public health administrators do not have the time nor the expertise to gather information which provide the SA they require on a daily basis. Moreover, disease events in other countries can rapidly become global public health concerns. ZIP provided linkage of pathogen selections to diseases and provided an effective way for listing existing subtypes. Options are recommended for selecting reservoir, vector, and host species. Daily multidisciplinary meetings were important for assessing the reliability, validity, and significance of collected data. More research is needed to determine the biosurveillance needs of decision makers and to evaluate the effectiveness of any public health action that occurs due to the receipt of timely and quality biosurveillance reports.