The new animal disease notification and crisis management system in Germany

The German TierSeuchen-Nachrichten-System (TSN, animal disease notification system) is established since 1995 as the official system of electronic compilation, transfer and analysis of data regarding notifiable animal diseases. It incorporates geographical information system (GIS) tools for the visualization of the spatial distribution of both farms and animal disease outbreaks. In April 2009, the third generation of TSN was launched. One of the new features of TSN 3.0 is the so-called animal disease crisis module. This module is intended to support official veterinarians in the management of animal disease outbreaks, and the coordination in space and time of administrative and logistic response actions within different restriction zones, like e.g. estimation of the number of susceptible animals, sample sizes, clinical examinations, disinfection, and culling.