An online system for bioterrorism surveillance

Abstract

<p>Bioterrorism has become one of the greatest threats for nations. As bioterrorism threats are increasing these days, research in bioterrorism surveillance has been conducted to detect the threats at the earliest time. Following this research, some bioterrorism surveillance systems have been developed. Some of these systems use humans as indicators and the others use animals. Both of these systems detect the threats by collecting and analyzing the statistical data on health trends. Since most bio-weapons start as animal diseases, using animals as indicators allow identification of a bioterrorism threat at earlier time than using humans.;Current bioterrorism surveillance systems based on animals focus only on certain groups of animal species while there are other animal species that are also very susceptible to the highly-threatening diseases. The system introduced here provides a step towards the identification of highly-threatening diseases in animal species, such as cattle and pigs. In the event of such identification, a red flag is raised and related information is sent to agents responsible for looking into the threats in more detail. The design, implementation and result of this system are given and explained.</p>