High Impact Animal Diseases (HIADs)
High impact animal diseases (HIADs) affect society as a whole, and the effects of many diseases reach across into food safety and wider public and environmental health. AVIS is dedicated to the prevention, management and eventual eradication of such diseases, whether known or emerging, by the provision of affordable, immediately accessible knowledge and expertise, at the point of need.
This can be accomplished in a virtual form, on-line, or in person, through a global network of highly experienced veterinarians. Often, both approaches are needed in a blend adapted to the needs of a particular situation or HIAD management objective. While AVIS as a project was founded in 1992, the trigger for founding AVIS College in 2002 was the 2001 FMD outbreak when over 8 million visits were made to the AVIS FMD site.
AVIS College approaches its work within a "one world/ one medicine" framework. Hence it operates an equity pricing policy, based on capacity to pay. The College veterinarians and in-house IT staff have long-standing expertise in providing knowledge management and knowledge transfer to stakeholders, such as owners, producers and veterinarians, but equally to economists, epidemiologists and ethicists. It is global in both its programmes and outreach, with subscribers and users in over 150 countries.
AVIS online resources are constantly reviewed and updated, benefiting from individual and institutional contributions from all over the world, including Institute of Animal Health, UK, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, and a number of leading universities and reference laboratories. All content is peer-reviewed.
AVIS College
The AVIS College consists of a President, Dr. Apostolos Rantsios,
and a group of invited fellows from all over the world. Fellows
are highly experienced, hands-on professionals in the field of
animal and veterinary public health but are also drawn from related
disciplines such as informatics, communications, economics, public
policy, and education. Fellows are responsible for policy and direction
of AVIS and are commonly contributors to and reviewers of information
and knowledge published through the AVIS portal.
In 2007 AVIS College is also developing an Associates program to support requests for assistance from a growing number of countries.
The Expert at the Point of Need
The AVIS College is a virtual organisation using broadband internet to provide affordable access to world class expertise on an "on demand" basis.
AVIS calls the group of diseases addressed in the AVIS portal "High
Impact Diseases". "High Impact"
reflects the recognition that animal diseases can do widespread
damage well beyond the animal world. High Impact epidemics result
in suffering and death to animals, disease and death in 
humans,
failures in food safety, trade restrictions, adverse effects on
rural industries and livelihoods, such as tourism, as well as serious
detriment to the environment. Short and long term costs can be devastatingly
high, running into billions.
There is also an increasing realisation that the vast majority (about 75%) of emerging infectious diseases of humans have an animal origin. Accordingly, many High Impact animal diseases will be either transboundary or zoonotic in nature.
Promoting Interoperability
Contingency planning and emergency prevention are intrinsic to the AVIS
approach to High Impact diseases. In recent years, it has become more and
more obvious that a critical success factor in disease prevention is the
speed and accuracy with which key information is captured, analysed and disseminated.
Well-informed decision making is a vital aid in preventing the escalation
of a local emergency into an international crisis.
AVIS has developed a novel approach to this communication task, under the general rubric of interoperability. Promoting interoperability is a key objective for AVIS, both through effective knowledge management and through the increasing integration of live data and other essential management tools (such as direct access to contingency plans) into AVIS programs. The AVIS approach may be represented in schematic form as follows:
Interoperability works on two levels, technical, enabling all data and communications systems (such as databases, internet and telephony) to connect to each other and work together, and cultural, adopting the same values, methodologies, standards and best practices for tackling the complex problems that affect us all.
The AVIS Project
A Decade of Change
During the last decade, animal health has witnessed unprecedented
challenges. These stem from a variety of causes, including: rapidly
increasing demand for animal protein, the demand-driven “livestock revolution”,
the ever increasing consumer demand for quality and safe food of
animal origin, dynamic changes in livestock farming, animal movement
patterns and marketing practices, globalised movement of people
and commodities, increasing concern for animal welfare, changes
in climate and changes in the world economic order. Concomitant
with such events have been changes in the incidence, distribution and dynamics
of infectious animal diseases both new and old.
New and Emerging Diseases
New animal diseases, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), Hendra and Nipah and new strains of food-borne enteric infections,
have caused major concerns for human health. Yet the traditional
zoonoses, such as brucellosis and tuberculosis, continue to take
their toll especially in developing countries.
Transboundary Animal Diseases
Epidemic livestock diseases, the so-called transboundary animal
diseases, which were once thought to be of diminishing significance
to the livestock industries of developed countries have in recent
years caused heavy socio-economic losses in both developed and
developing countries. While such diseases as African swine fever
and trypanosomosis have respectively hampered sustained pig and
cattle productivity for small-scale producers in Africa, peste
des petits ruminants (PPR) has caused heavy losses of small ruminants
in newly infected areas of South Asia and The Middle East. Rift
Valley fever, a disease previously confined to Sub-Saharan Africa,
has recently extended to the Arabian Peninsular.
By far the most dramatic events have been associated with new episodes of foot-and-mouth disease and classical swine fever in parts of the world previously considered free. The recent incidence of major outbreaks of these two diseases has woken-up the international community to the increasing inter-dependence and risks to disease spread that is associated with such inter-dependence. Thus they have occurred in countries with a long history of freedom. They have also sometimes been detected a long distance from the presumed origin of infection. The 10-year pandemic spread of the PanAsian FMD Type O strain from South Asia eventually as far east as Japan and then to South Africa, UK and other parts of Europe has exemplified the global nature of FMD and a justified call to tackle the problem of FMD and other transboundary animal diseases at source, in developing countries where such diseases are still endemic.
The New Paradigm
These new animal health challenges demand newer and more dynamic
approaches to the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge about
the diseases, the standards, the regulation and strategies for
their effective prevention and progressive control. This is now
the new paradigm in the management of animal health not merely
as an on-the-farm technical service, but above all, as an international
collective responsibility.
AVIS 1992 to-date
AVIS (Advanced Veterinary Information System) was conceived in
1992 as an instrument for accelerating the adoption of the new
information technologies into the global arena of animal health
in order to facilitate access to authoritative information by animal
health specialists throughout the world. It focuses on the development
and production of internationally peer-reviewed, multi-media educational
programmes on infectious animal diseases including zoonoses and
on food safety. AVIS has been championed by the consortium of TELOS-Aleff,
a specialised multi-media company together with the UK Institute
of Animal Health (IAH) and the two international standards setting
and development agencies concerned with animal health, namely the
Office International des Épizooties (OIE) and the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
SPECIAL EDITIONS
Special editions have been developed successfully to date for the
European Union, TAIEX Office, servicing 52 countries, for Central
and South America, for the Republic of Tanzania and for the Sudan.
AVIS welcomes applications from countries or regions for special
editions suited to their needs.
Support and Contacts
Content Proposals
Please contact Professor Julian Hilton, AVIS Commissioning Editor,
for advice on submitting content proposals to AVIS, at the AVIS
Office or email jhilton@aviscollege.com.
Enquiries and Sales
For inquiries and sales please contact Dr. Malika Moussaid, mmoussaid@aviscollege.com.
AVIS Office:
53 Skylines,
Limeharbour,
LONDON,
E14 9TS, UK
+44 (0) 20 7515 9009 (voice)
+44 (0) 20 7515 5465 (fax)