A modern way to stop the disease spread

During this session, Prof Gilbert had a little surprise for everyone of us: it’s an in-class exercise! The exercise is about ASEAN Food Safety Initiative (ASFI). The project aims to overcome the problem currently experienced by livestock industry: the spread of mad cow disease in England and Australia as well as the pig virus and Avian flu in Asia. One of the idea is to introduce a monitoring system based on wireless infrastructure.

The group task is to work out a preliminary design for the information presented to the livestock inspectors working for the Ministry of Agriculture. For the background knowledge, it is identified that there will be five parties involved on this initiative: Farmer, Veterinarian, Transport Storage, Slaughter Butchering and Distribution/Sale.

After discussing for about half an hour, my group came up with the following concept. First, we are organizing the flow into two lines: product flow and information flow. In stage 1 (Farmer), the information collected is about the generic data describing the statistics of each batch of livestock. A specific tag is given for each statistics representing each batch. After carefully inspecting the validity of these sets of data and matching them with the actual field observation, the government agent will submit them to the publicly accessible database maintained by Ministry of Agriculture. One point to note is that in our concept, only those data which are in compliance with the standard set by MoA.

The next stage is Veterinarian. As vets are in charge of giving vaccination and performing routine medical check-up, their records will be needed for database update. Any particular information about the disease infecting the cattle can be monitored in the database.

So far, I only discussed about the information flow, which can only be passed to the next stage upon approval by MoA inspectors. The product flow basically goes the same way. On the Stage 3 (Transport and Storage), when the station receives a market-ready batch of livestock, they must check the tag number on the database to see whether this batch has been inspected by MoA. If the tag number do not appear on the database, it either means that this batch was not approved by MoA or it has not been inspected. Either way, the station must contact the livestock supplier and MoA. In a circumstance where it was actually not approved, the station keeper must immediately dispose the cattle, so that the product flow stop at this stage.

The same procedure applies for the Stage 4 (Slaughterhouse) and Stage 5 (Distribution Sale). By stopping the flow of a “defect” product as early as possible, the goal of AFSI could be achieved. In addition to the product flow management in Stage 4, the information flow management also takes place. During the slaughtering, the slaughterhouse must record the slaughter method they perform on the cattle. These records are then submitted to the database. This will ensure that the information on the database is updated.

And that basically completes our concept for this assignment.