An epidemiological information management system (EpiMAN) has been developed to aid the
Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries (MAF) contain and eradicate a foot-and-mouth disease (FMD)
epidemic, should one ever occur. Design objectives for the information management elements of the
system included the need to manage the vast quantities of data that eradication procedures for an
epidemic would be expected to generate within a very short time; the ability to apply current
epidemiological understanding of disease spread to the data processing tasks; to reduce some of the
foreseen processing bottlenecks; and to provide decision support to the data entry personnel. Design
objectives for the veterinary management elements of the system included the presentation of up-todate
status reports in formats that facilitate national decision-making; the ability to optimize manpower
resource allocation; and the capacity to evaluate the relative merits of alternative technical decisions,
each of which carried different implicit risks.