As a member of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), and the reporting authority for the United States, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) is responsible for reporting wildlife disease outbreaks that involve diseases which are not OIE-listed (https://www.oie.int/wahis_2/public/wahidwild.php# ). These outbreaks are to be reported on a semesterly basis via OIE's WAHIS-Wild reporting system. The data fields described within are based on those in WAHIS-Wild. Since OIE's reporting mechanism is based primarily on domestic and agricultural animals, several of the variables are not applicable to wildlife (i.e. vaccination, slaughtered, etc.). In an effort to use a consistent data source that is broad in scope and captures information from around the country, from various natural resource management authorities, NWHC will use the Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership - Event Reporting System (WHISPers - https://whispers.usgs.gov/home ) as the sole source to generate and supply the requested information to OIE. Data supplied to OIE have been restricted to publicly available information on wildlife morbidity/mortality and surveillance events in WHISPers.
