By Bruce Cochrane.
The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center says Near Real Time Domestic Swine Disease Monitoring will provide swine producers and their veterinarians an up to date picture of the swine health situation across the U.S.
In partnership with the Swine Health Information Center the University of Minnesota and Iowa State University have developed a Near Real Time Domestic Swine Disease Monitoring System.
Dr. Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center, says this project follows up on the standardization of the recording and reporting of test results by veterinary diagnostic laboratories and will make the data they collect available for analysis.
Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
The audience here is the producer and the veterinarian.
We want to make this information available to them so they can make informed real time decisions about their movement, their biosecurity practices, but providing just a bunch of data to producers and veterinarians really isn't enough.
We can provide them all kinds of test results and all kinds of numbers but the important thing here is going to be how to interpret that data.
It's fairly simple to give them test results.
The hard part is going to be the interpretation and the context around the data that's going to come with this project.
We're putting together the system by which we can compile the data into a meaningful database that we can look and analyze and a database that makes sure that producer confidentiality and confidence in that database is maintained.
Then we're going to develop the system by which we use experts to look at that data, look at the change in the information and try to provide some context and some interpretation of what that could mean for the farmer, for the veterinarian in different areas of the country.
Dr. Sundberg says this is an important step in providing up to date very close to real time swine health information on how things are changing and what producers in different areas can expect.
Source: Farmscape