The Caribbean is a complex region were Caribbean countries and territories have various trade partners including the US, Canada, Europe,South and Central America, and Asia. Additionally, the Caribbean is situated along migratory birds' flyways where birds can disseminate pathogens along their routes southwards or northwards. This makes the Caribbean region particularly vulnerable to animal and zoonotic disease emergence and spread, especially affecting main stock breeding industries in the Caribbean.
The main gap identified in Guadeloupe when planning development of entomological research was the lack of morphological diagnostic key for mosquitoes in the French West indies, and the Caribbean in general. Similarly, some sibling species or species of the same complex will need to be differenciated by molecular tools.
Vaccination is one of the main control strategies against animal infectious diseases, and it has become the main tool for health authorities willing to eradicate a disease. However, implementing a massive animal vaccination campaign requires a lot of resources, both human and capital. Providing governments with a tool to help them estimate accurately the resource requirements for the effective implementation of vaccination campaigns can be useful for several reasons:
Caribbean Veterinary Information System (C-VIS) - Georeferenced data collection tool ready for testing!
An online data collection tool has been set up using KoboToolbox, a free and open source tool. This is part of the GIS platform Caribbean Veterinary Information System.
You can check it out here. Feel free to send us feedback.
Relevant geographic information of the whole Caribbean region is being collected: animal and human population data, animal health and environmental information.
All this data is stored in a dedicated GeoNetwork Platform, which is a catalog application to manage spatially referenced resources.
