One health data audit: a spatio-temporal approach to cultivating sustainable multi-disciplinary collaboration and communication in zoonoses surveillance, control and stepwise elimination

Auditing public health data has become an important component of zoonosis surveillance for one health inclusion and communication. The concept of one health data audit may be defined as the inspection of data to assess their origins and traits, verifying their utility based on completeness, accuracy and timeliness in human-animal disease surveillance, food safety, security and other areas of public health importance. One health data audit involves looking at key metrics to make decisions about the properties of data sets in terms of the composite part of the tripartite of one health that they belong: animal, environment or human´s health attribution. In relation to the environmental component, one health data audit includes and promotes cartographic protocols for spatial and spatio-temporal data visualization, which plays a role in disease mapping and identification of associated risk factors, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We present ten critical points of how one health data audit was carried out, exemplified with dog bite victims´ records in rabies surveillance in West Africa. We concluded that as Global Positioning System (GPS) technology advances, so is its practical application in the tracking and mapping of zoonosis in space and time to achieve more accurate and complete one health data sources representation.