The current prototype for Handistatus II (i.e Help with World Animal Disease Status - version 2) is a Web application containing information on animal diseases that have serious consequences for international trade or public health. This information is regularly updated based on the emergency, monthly and annual reports sent to the Central Bureau of the Office International des Epizooties (OIE) by the veterinary administrations of countries and other official sources.

The annual information on the animal health situation worldwide is almost entirely derived from the collection and processing of the questionnaires on animal health, common to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the OIE, which the OIE has distributed to all countries on behalf of the three organisations since 1996.

This prototype is intended to replace the HandiSTATUS computer database, originally developed by Dr Theresa Bernardo and Mr Charles Schotman within the framework of a project of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), with the support of Agriculture Canada and the University of Guelph (Canada), and more recently the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA/APHIS) and the OIE, before being taken over, maintained and distributed by the OIE for the last few years.

The obsolescence of the DOS-based technology used for HandiSTATUS led to the OIE abandoning it and developing a new application which, while respecting the spirit of the original and being based on the same principles, takes advantage of the many possibilities offered by the Internet.

A first prototype was demonstrated during the OIE General Session in May 1999, and improvements were made during the following months. The prototype available today prefigures a more complex version of HandiSTATUS II, which will include data going back over a greater number of years and an assistance module for making animal health decisions for the import of animals and animal products based on the recommendations of the Terrestrial Animal Health code..