IT Going Wild on Foot and Mouth Disease

Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is one of the most disruptive animal health threats facing agriculture and wildlife management today. Highly contagious, economically devastating, and notoriously difficult to control, it places enormous pressure on farmers, veterinarians, conservationists, and regulatory bodies alike.

Despite years of experience dealing with outbreaks, the reality on the ground shows that traditional systems are no longer enough.

But where biology creates the problem, technology is increasingly becoming part of the solution.

This is where Buffalo Analytics comes in.

Who Is Buffalo Analytics?

Buffalo Analytics is a specialised disease management system designed to bring structure, speed, and visibility to one of the most complex environments imaginable: wildlife and livestock movement in disease-sensitive regions.

While the system was originally aimed at buffalo, it has expanded to support broader wildlife and livestock management and disease control initiatives.

What Does Buffalo Analytics Do?

At its core, Buffalo Analytics supports statutory animal health functions, including:

• Movement permits The platform has improved permit issuing times, significantly reducing administrative delays while maintaining compliance.
• Tracking and tracing A critical function for disease control, allowing authorities to trace animal movements quickly and accurately when outbreaks occur.
• Disease-related risk analysis Especially focused on animal movements, helping decision-makers assess and mitigate the risk of spreading diseases such as FMD.
• Vaccine roll out The system helps to determine where and how much vaccine needs to go to municipal areas and farmers.

In short, it transforms what was once paper-heavy, fragmented, and slow into a centralised, data-driven system.

The Minds Behind the Platform

Buffalo Analytics is built on a rare combination of veterinary science and advanced technology.

David Pretorius (CEO) - BVSc, University of Pretoria Bringing deep veterinary and regulatory insight into disease management and animal health.

Jaco Kroon * BSc Hons (Computer Science) Providing the technical architecture and systems thinking required to scale and secure the platform.

Together with other industry partners, this blend of expertise ensures the system is not just technically sound, but biologically and legally fit for purpose.

From Wildlife to Livestock: Expanded Analytics

As the need for integrated disease management grew, so did the platform.

Buffalo and Livestock Analytics is powered by the same team and foundation, but with expanded functionality, including:

1. Ingesting additional datasets across livestock sectors.
2. Enhanced reporting and analytics.
3. Support for vaccination requests and records.
4. Broader oversight across wildlife–livestock interfaces.

This expansion reflects a growing reality: disease management cannot be siloed. Wildlife, livestock, and regulatory systems must work together — and that requires shared data and intelligent analysis.

Unpacking Foot and Mouth Disease

Foot and Mouth Disease is a highly contagious viral disease affecting cloven-hoofed animals such as cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, and pigs.

What makes FMD particularly dangerous is:

1. Its rapid spread through direct contact, aerosols, and contaminated equipment.
2. Severe economic consequences, including trade restrictions.
3. The complexity of tracing outbreaks once movements have occurred.

In environments where animals move between farms, reserves, auctions, and provinces, manual systems simply can't keep up.

Foot and Mouth Disease in South Africa: Our Reality

The current FMD landscape in South Africa is deeply concerning:

• Multiple outbreaks have occurred — and much of the spread is believed to be underreported.
• The disease has been ongoing since 2019, with KwaZulu-Natal being particularly affected.
• Outbreaks have now expanded to all provinces except the Northern Cape.
• Vaccine availability and access remain limited, slowing containment efforts.
• High densities of buffalo, especially in Limpopo (Waterberg West), significantly increase risk.
• Widespread misinformation, reminiscent of the Covid era, undermines coordinated responses and trust.

This combination creates an environment where outbreaks are harder to detect, trace, and contain.

The Real Problems (A Practitioner's Perspective)

From an operational and industry standpoint, several systemic issues continue to undermine FMD control:

1. Lack of Coordination Efforts remain fragmented across provinces, industries, and regulatory bodies.
2. Lack of Reporting Outbreaks are often detected late or not formally reported, reducing the effectiveness of response measures.
3. Limited Inter-Industry Cooperation Disease does not distinguish between sectors, yet systems often do:

• Wildlife ranching (buffalo)
• Cattle
• Pigs
• Siloed approaches weaken the entire control framework.

1. Politics Gets in the Way Decision-making can be slowed or distorted by political considerations rather than epidemiological realities.
2. Everyone Tries to Be the Hero Independent actions, however well-intended, often result in duplicated effort, conflicting data, and reduced accountability.
3. Almost Zero Traceability Without reliable, shared movement data, tracing outbreaks becomes slow, incomplete, or impossible.
4. No Clear Accountability When systems are manual or fragmented, responsibility becomes blurred -- and critical lessons are lost.

This is where IT fundamentally changes the game.

Where IT Meets Disease Control

Modern disease management depends on:

1. Real-time data
2. Accurate movement histories
3. Fast permit processing
4. Risk-based decision-making

Platforms like Buffalo Analytics don't replace veterinarians, regulators, or producers -- they enable them to work together, using accurate data instead of assumptions.

Ultimate Linux Solutions Deploys High-Availability IT Infrastructure

Ultimate Linux Solutions (ULS) assisted Buffalo & Livestock Analytics with the deployment of a dedicated, high-availability infrastructure hosted at one of ULS’s points of presence in South Africa.

The deployment included a fully redundant cluster consisting of multiple web servers and a MariaDB Galera database cluster, designed to provide resilience, scalability, and performance. ULS also implemented fully redundant networking across the environment, removing single points of failure.

This infrastructure has continued to deliver exceptional platform availability, enabling all stakeholders to remain focused on their vital work in combating Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD), rather than on IT operations.

A Connected Future for Disease Control

Foot and Mouth Disease is not going away. But the way we manage it can -- and must -- evolve.

South Africa's agricultural and wildlife sectors need coordination over competition, data over guesswork, and systems that support accountability rather than obscure it.

In that sense, IT isn't “going wild” -- it's finally stepping in where complexity demands it.

In the fight against Foot and Mouth Disease, technology is no longer a “nice to have”. It is a critical tool in protecting agriculture, conservation, and food security.