SHIC Funds Regional Swine Disease Warning Tool Development and Testing

With funding provided by SHIC, the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project team at the University of Minnesota developed and tested a tool to enable timely communication of regional disease activity, The Early Regional Occurrence Warning (TEROW) project. TEROW represents additional infrastructure to respond to emerging diseases and highlights efforts towards preparedness, as it can be utilized for a wide range of diseases with the application of standardized monitoring through MSHMP.

Using porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome in the beta testing, principal investigator Mariana Kukuti and her team developed a code to retrieve and summarize, for each enrolled site, the total number of sites within a 25(+)-mile radius experiencing an ongoing PRRS outbreak, as well as a trend indicator to show if the number of cases increased or decreased from the previous week.