E-Blana, the Irish Internet specialist, has signed a new joint venture with a Northern Ireland company to market a product that could help fight animal disease outbreaks, such as foot-and-mouth.
The Dublin company has signed a joint-venture agreement with Portadown-based Pace to promote Eurovet, a system that can trace animals from the "farm gate to the factory gate".
Pace was one of a number of companies in Europe which received funding from the European Union during the 1990s to carry out research into the movement of livestock and issue of disease control in Europe.
The Portadown company commercialised its research to create Eurovet, a multi-lingual, health and disease control system that monitors the movement of livestock by way of "identifiers" such as ear tags.
The system requires authorised users from state vets to animal breeding organisations to register information about each animal on the Eurovet system which is then fed into a central database.
According to Mr John McGrann, managing director of Pace, the aim is to create records for animals that will contain detailed information on vaccinations, ownership and death.
Mr McGrann said: "In January 2002 a common currency is being introduced within the European Union but there is not as yet a common European system for tracing and controlling animal movements. This has important economic, social and health implications."
Pace recently won its first contract to supply Eurovet in Europe from the Bulgarian Government and is currently in negotiations to set up the system in a number of countries in central Europe.
According to Mr McGrann, the joint-venture agreement with E-Blana will now enable the Eurovet system to be accessed via the Internet for the first time.
