WHISPers: Sharing Wildlife Disease Data to Warn the Nation of Threats

USGS and U.S. Department of Agriculture staff respond to a Newcastle disease event. Photograph courtesy of Paul Wolf, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Why wildlife disease matters

Global trade and travel, urbanization and intensive agriculture have brought wildlife, domestic animals and people into closer contact, creating more chances for zoonoses — diseases shared between animals and humans — to spill over. More than 70 percent of emerging zoonotic diseases worldwide start in wildlife.

Defending against emerging diseases and bioterror threats takes integrated strategies: better surveillance of animal and zoonotic disease, strong national leadership, and good management tools. Active biosurveillance gives early detection and warning, and better coordination and decisions.

The national system already has well-established channels for human and domestic animal health data, through CDC, the Department of Agriculture, and state, county and local authorities. Wildlife data have been harder to get: wildlife health has less infrastructure and fewer resources, and authority over wildlife is split among federal, state, Tribal and Indigenous agencies.

What WHISPers is

The Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership–event reporting system (WHISPers) was built by the USGS National Wildlife Health Center to share wildlife health information and give timely warning of disease threats. It is a free science gateway and data portal to query, display, report and export summaries of wildlife health events.

• One place: summarized wildlife health data from state, federal, Tribal and Indigenous natural resource agencies and other partners, in a single repository. It is also used to report pathogens in the U.S. to the World Organisation for Animal Health.
• Verified: all data are laboratory-confirmed by the center or partner labs and checked with the responsible agency; details of specific events are protected by account and agency credentials.
• Widely used: by mid-2022, more than 230 partners — state, federal, Tribal, Indigenous, international, university and nonprofit — had registered.
• Deep history: more than 45 years of wildlife disease data from the center, giving context for common diseases.

What counts as an event? Any noteworthy occurrence of one or more sick or dead wild animals clustered in time or space, possibly spanning several places, species and diagnoses. Tracking wildlife health supports a "One Health" approach — improving the health of people, animals and the environment together — much as syndromic surveillance does in human and agricultural medicine.

A USGS wildlife pathologist examines a bat to determine its cause of death, in the Biosafety Level 3 facilities of the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Photograph by Allison Klein, U.S. Geological Survey.

Partners in biosurveillance

The National Wildlife Health Center has monitored the nation's wildlife since 1975. It is the country's only federal Biosafety Level 3 diagnostic and research facility focused on wildlife health, and an international collaborating and reference center for wildlife disease.

• A second generation: from 2019, the center and USGS Web Informatics and Mapping built an expanded WHISPers that lets agencies enter, manage and visualize event data directly, for near real-time reporting, with data sharing and customizable notifications.
• Homeland Security: the upgrade was made possible by the Department of Homeland Security's National Biosurveillance Integration Center, whose mission is early warning of biological events of national significance. Together they are building a data portal to its Biosurveillance Ecosystem, an analysts' workbench that integrates many data streams.

Protective equipment and biosafety controls keep research on zoonotic pathogens, such as highly pathogenic avian influenza, safe. Photograph by Hon Ip, U.S. Geological Survey.

What comes next

WHISPers gives the biosurveillance community a clearer picture of the immediate disease risks wildlife may pose to people, domestic animals and other wildlife — and, by recording where diseases occur, which species carry them and how they change, of what makes wildlife populations resilient. Plans include:

• adding individual-level data and targeted surveillance — testing for a specific disease without a die-off;
• using the data to understand drivers of disease and build predictive tools;
• mobile apps and better search and visualization;
• a wider national and international network sharing data on priority pathogens.

Designed surveillance sampling, such as for the fungus that causes bat white-nose syndrome, allows pathogens to be detected early; WHISPers holds white-nose syndrome records back to 2010. Photograph by Katrien Werner, U.S. Geological Survey.

Sources

Based on U.S. Geological Survey, "WHISPers—Providing Situational Awareness of Wildlife Disease Threats to the Nation—A Fact Sheet for the Biosurveillance Community," Fact Sheet 2022–3022, June 2022, USGS; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The photographs, and two passages the import had cut short, are restored from the fact sheet's PDF.