Wildlife Health Technology
Since its inception, the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre (CCWHC) has maintained a secure data repository which helps researchers and government agencies make sound decisions about wildlife disease management issues.
During the last 15 years, this database has undergone many changes, improvements and expansions. In recent years, concerns such as West Nile Virus, Avian Influenza, Chronic Wasting Disease and Rabies have all been monitored using software specifically developed by the CCWHC. This dedicated focus on providing tools to researchers and decision makers has enabled the CCWHC to react rapidly to emerging diseases in order to put relevant data in the hands of those who need it. Due to the sensitive nature of this data, access is strictly controlled through a comprehensive request and review process.
The goal of the CCWHC database is to provide a single, comprehensive library of wildlife disease surveillance efforts in Canada, which helps to provide a complete picture of disease occurrence from coast to coast; a valuable asset in monitoring and predicting disease movement. These data can be used by our researchers, government and non-government agencies as well as international partners to formulate disease response policy and protocols. These measures are an essential component in ensuring the “One World, One Health” approach has adequate support from the wildlife health sciences.
Being Canadian, we like to share our knowledge and expertise and in recent years, the CCWHC has begun to provide other wildlife health agencies and researchers with these tools, in the hope that their work will become easier and more valuable to themselves and their partners. From the Netherlands to the US, more people are becoming aware of the database that the CCWHC has built and we are responding to more requests than ever to have access to our tools and expertise. This bodes well for future development of our toolset as we speak to more people and diversify our product and its capabilities.
How can a researcher add information to the db?
How can one view it for interest, to check accuracy, or to use the data?
I wouldn’t disagree that “Being Canadian, we like to share our knowledge…” but the policy of “strict control through a comprehensive request and review process” doesn’t really reflect that good will.
Murray
Thanks for your feedback Murray. The statement about sharing knowledge was specifically referring to our knowledge of data management rather than the data itself, though I can see how this could be interpreted ambiguously. CCWHC does share a great deal of data with interested third parties (such as independent researchers) as well as our sponsors and partner agencies. Due to privacy law in Canada as well as certain sensitivities concerning certain diseases, we release data in a controlled manner in order to provide the most accurate, comprehensive data sets to those who request them.