Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency "Receive Global Animal Disease Outbreak Information via KakaoTalk"

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwangho Lee] The Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency announced on the 5th that, in response to the trend of the e-government era, it will switch the 'Overseas Animal Disease Occurrence Information Sharing Service,' which had been sent via text messages, to a smartphone-based KakaoTalk channel starting early this month.

The Quarantine Agency collects and analyzes animal disease occurrence information published daily by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and provides the Overseas Animal Disease Occurrence Information Sharing Service to quarantine agencies, related organizations, and other stakeholders.

Global occurrence information on highly pathogenic avian influenza, African swine fever, other malignant livestock infectious diseases, novel diseases such as COVID-19, and zoonotic diseases serves as important reference material for related institutions and the veterinary and livestock sectors in responding to animal disease and zoonotic disease crises.

The existing text message transmission method had drawbacks such as inconvenience in manually reflecting requests for reception or blocking by the person in charge in the system, difficulty in providing additional information beyond text, and relatively high costs due to classification as long messages.

Going forward, information recipients will be able to voluntarily add or delete overseas trend channels, enabling information provision only to those who want the information. Additionally, depending on the importance of the information, it will be easier to provide additional detailed content such as urgent reports and occurrence maps. The message unit cost using KakaoTalk is more than 30% cheaper than the existing text message transmission cost, so budget savings are also expected.

Moon Woon-kyung, head of the Risk Assessment Division at the Quarantine Agency, said, "We will continuously improve the overseas animal disease information sharing service to enhance its utilization in domestic quarantine and prevention work," and added, "Since anyone can use the service by adding the KakaoTalk channel, we hope many citizens will use it."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.