Improving animal health outcomes
MPI's endemic disease dashboard provides disease information and data for people involved in managing animal health.
Informed decisions about animal health
The dashboard allows users to explore endemic diseases, outbreaks and antimicrobial resistance in New Zealand animals. Available data can be explored by species, district and disease. Disease summaries are provided alongside information on impacts, prevalence and on-farm control.
Linked with real-world impact
The dashboard contains information on diseases that regularly affect animals (cattle, sheep, horses, pigs and deer) in New Zealand and are considered to have a high level of impact. Impact level scores for different categories of risk are presented for each disease – including the risk of economic, environmental and animal welfare impacts. This allows users to gain a holistic overview of different animal diseases and their consequences.
A deep dive into diagnostic data
The dashboard includes antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) results of bacteria cultured from animal samples submitted by veterinarians to three commercial veterinary diagnostic laboratories in New Zealand. Resistance data are available for key pathogens isolated from each animal species.
Technology that doesn’t restrict growth
Built in R, the dashboard is adaptable and can easily be expanded to include additional themes. The initial version of the dashboard was focussed on disease outbreaks with an AMR extension added at a later stage. To ensure information can be accessed quickly and reduce loading times, a {targets} pipeline is used to pre-process relevant data prior to deployment of the Shiny app. This also reduces the external dependencies of the dashboard, making it straightforward to restore the data from backup should a problem occur, and minimising the risk of failure during app deployment.
Staying on top of disease outbreaks
Users can easily look at reported disease outbreaks - cases where increased disease incidence has been confirmed on a farm, in a district, or region. Case descriptions are provided by New Zealand based laboratories and MPI’s Animal Health laboratory and Incursion team, with the support of submitting veterinarians and their clients.
Monitoring AMR and antibiotic sales
MPI's AMR team monitors antimicrobial resistance in bacteria associated with animals and also measures antibiotic sales for use in animals and horticulture. The dashboard allows users to investigate antibiotic sales, AMR in food production animals and veterinary clinical data. The analysis of diagnostic laboratory records provides a passive surveillance system to monitor for AMR associated with animals.
