Unveiling ADIS, the EU Animal Disease Information System and its link to WAHIS

Modernising Animal Health Data Management

The Animal Disease Information System (ADIS) is an innovative digital platform developed by the European Union (EU) to streamline animal health data collection and analysis.

By integrating both Union Notification and Union Reporting, ADIS aims to significantly improve decision-making processes and disease control measures in the EU.

This novel platform works in tandem with the World Animal Health Information System (WAHIS), managed by the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH).

This page will explain the ADIS connection with WAHIS, highlighting the benefits of their collaboration and providing examples of their practical applications.

What is ADIS?

ADIS is a secure digital platform designed by the European Commission to provide a centralised hub for animal health data management in the EU. The system is built to simplify data notification and reporting, improve data quality and accuracy, and facilitate data entry by the Competent Authorities’ users.

By enabling efficient, one-time reporting for EU Member States and associated countries, ADIS helps reduce the administrative burden and ensures data consistency.

ADIS empowers decision-makers to make well-informed choices based on the most current and accurate information available.

For example, during an outbreak of an animal disease (e.g. African swine fever) in a Member State, ADIS allows for timely reporting of the outbreak both in ADIS and in WAHIS at the same time; thus, fostering global rapid response to contain the spread of the disease.

The Connection Between ADIS and WAHIS

The connection between ADIS and WAHIS is a critical aspect of their interoperability. These two-systems exchange data through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), ensuring a seamless flow of information between them.

This data exchange is designed to allow for efficient notification of exceptional events in WAHIS while maintaining a single reporting process for EU Member States. Note that WOAH’s six-monthly and annual reports as well as immediate notifications for emerging diseases will still need to be submitted to WAHIS.

The scope of current interconnection applies to Animal Disease Events notifications only (immediate notifications and follow-up reports).

An example of this interoperability is the dispatch of event and outbreak data from ADIS to WAHIS, the ‘pulling’ of reference tables from WAHIS or the feedback loop related to the WOAH validation process to be fed into ADIS.

The Benefits of ADIS-WAHIS Collaboration

The collaboration between ADIS and WAHIS exemplifies how digital platforms can work together to improve animal health data management on a global scale. The interconnection of these systems requires a solid maintenance, increases ADIS complexity and requires additional resources and financial cost. Nevertheless, it offers important advantages:

1. Enhanced data quality and consistency: by exchanging data between ADIS and WAHIS, both systems can maintain accurate and up-to-date information, improving the overall quality of animal health data. This is particularly important in the case of risk assessments which need reliable data sources.
2. Streamlined notification by Member States: the interoperability of ADIS and WAHIS allows for efficient, one-time data entry for EU Member States, reducing the administrative burden and ensuring data consistency. For instance, in a Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak, Member States can quickly input data into ADIS, which is then automatically shared with WAHIS, ensuring information sharing which fulfils requirements of both EU legislation and WOAH international standards.
3. Improved decision-making: with access to comprehensive and current animal health data, decision-makers can make better-informed choices regarding disease surveillance and control measures. A new section of the ADIS public interface is being developed to make the most important information available to the public.

The migration process for linking ADIS with WAHIS

The migration process was planned in a careful manner considering potential pitfalls and resources available for the connection of both systems. Some major issues were considered, e.g. how to handle ongoing events and outbreaks ongoing in WAHIS at the time of the ADIS-WAHIS linking.

“How migration was managed”: a complete data transfer of all outbreaks from WAHIS to ADIS would not have been practical. ADIS users had to perform a significantly time-consuming verification of the migrated data.

Migration of the ongoing events alone from WAHIS was also not considered a good solution as it would have only provided a partial view of newly created outbreaks within ADIS.

Therefore, the chosen solution, backed by WAHIS and ADIS users, was to close the ongoing events in WAHIS prior to interconnection. When required, ongoing events were re-opened in ADIS with ongoing and new outbreaks.

This reduced the previously described issues and simplifies the migration process.

Impact of the migration on data displayed in WAHIS:

• The total number of outbreaks was not affected by the migration, in normal conditions. For most outbreaks, they were closed by the reporting country in WAHIS for ongoing events shortly before the migration. However, for those outbreaks that did not meet the requirements to be closed in WAHIS on the migration date, these were re-opened in ADIS, and this resulted in an apparent increase in the outbreak count.
• Risk related to the misreading of events totals as ongoing events closed before the migration were re-created in ADIS (if the epidemiological situation required so). This resulted in some cases in a higher total number of events. This increase, while not reflecting a genuine rise in events, may be attributed to the migration process. This could have an impact on the total number of events recorded in the six-monthly reports.

Figure 2: Event chart (fictive data): In the example chart you can see that some countries needed to re-open the events after the migration as there are still ongoing outbreaks.

Therefore, it is recommended that special attention is required when comparing data before and after the migration to avoid misunderstanding the reason for the possible increase in the number of events and outbreaks in WAHIS. For some countries, there may have been no increase in events if it was decided that the event was fully resolved.

As a mitigating measure, the re-opening in ADIS of an event just closed in WAHIS did not trigger the WAHIS Immediate Notification alert email as this would have been part of the transition process.

Re-opened events are identified by the existence of an epidemiological comment referencing the previously closed event; such comments were entered both in the WAHIS event to be closed and in the newly created event in ADIS.

Events closed with the stable epidemiological situation in WAHIS required continued reporting in the six-monthly reports as per normal WOAH notification requirements.

WAHIS follows a data validation process that might exceptionally result in data differences with ADIS during the synchronisation process and/or when additional clarifications or justifications are requested by WOAH.

ADIS - WAHIS Interoperability: Onboarding Phase

After a successful pilot phase in 2024, the last phase of ADIS-WAHIS interconnection was launched in January 2025. We successfully onboarded all the 44 Member States and associated countries by July 2025.

We adopted a phased approach with multiple waves of onboarding to allow small groups of countries to interconnect gradually and provide personalised support from both the EU and WOAH teams.

Conclusions

The implementation of ADIS and its integration with WAHIS constitute a significant advancement in the management and exchange of animal health data. Collectively, these platforms provide substantial benefits to EU Member States, associated countries, and global stakeholders by strengthening data consistency, interoperability, and transparency. The successful onboarding of all participating countries, accompanied by consistently positive feedback, reflects a strong collective commitment to improve the global animal health information ecosystem.

It is essential that all WAHIS and ADIS users fully understand both interconnected systems to ensure accurate interpretation of data. As the migration process has resulted in an increased number of recorded events for ADIS countries, this should be viewed as a natural and positive outcome of system enhancement rather than a change in epidemiological patterns. While this collaboration has reduced the workload of EU Member States, an inevitable complexity was added to the EU ADIS and WOAH WAHIS systems. This needs to be managed by additional resources to allow the EU to have a centralised system to reduce the administrative burden for Member States’ administrations.