JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

ASF has been spreading in many countries globally, causing a serious impact in the pig industry. Thailand has intensively prevented the introduction of ASFV into pig farms in the country by implementing various activities.

Objective:

With enhancing the prevention and control, this study aimed; to identify the possibly potential areas of ASF introduction and transmission in Thailand, ii) to develop a tool for farm assessment of ASF risk introduction focusing on smallholders, and iii) to develop a spatial analysis tool easily used by local officers for disease prevention and control planning.

Methods:

We applied a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach with spatial and farm assessment and integrated the outputs with necessary spatial layers for developing a spatial analysis on a web-based platform.

Results:

The map referred to possibly potential areas for ASF introduction and transmission was derived from six spatial risk factors namely; the distance to port with the highest relative importance, followed by the distance to the border, the number of pig farms using swill feeding, the density of small pig farms (<50 heads), the pig moving in the area, and the distance to slaughterhouse, respectively. The possible transmission areas were divided into five levels (very low, low, medium, high, and very high) at the sub-district level, with 27 sub-districts in 10 provinces having very high suitability and 560 sub-districts in 34 provinces having high suitability. Regarding farm level, 17 biosecurity practices considered as useful and practical for smallholders were selected and developed on a mobile application platform. The outputs from previous steps integrated with necessary GIS layers were added on a spatial analysis online platform.

Conclusions:

The tools developed here have been complemented with other strategies to fight against introduction of ASF into pig farms in the country so far. The areas showing high and very high risk for disease introduction and transmission were applied for spatially-information planning, for example, intensive surveillance, strict animal movement, and public awareness. In addition, farms with low biosecurity were improved in these areas, which the risk assessment developed on a mobile application here helped enhance this matter. The spatial analysis on a web-based platform helped facilitate the authorities for disease prevention planning.