A tool developed by Iowa State University is helping identify changes in swine disease diagnosis to assess disease risk.The SHIC-funded Data-Driven Etiology Index, created by Iowa State University and profiled in the Swine Health Information Center's September eNewsletter, provides an automated and reproducible method to help prioritize disease threats based on real-world data.
SHIC Executive Director Dr. Lisa Becton says the index looks at disease occurrence and geographic distribution to identify change and assess risk.
Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:
Researchers used confirmed tissue-based diagnoses from Iowa State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory to rank disease activity and identify potential emerging changes. They utilized greater than 59 thousand porcine tissue cases that were sent to Iowa State between 2020 and 2024, and identified bacterial, viral, parasitic, and metabolic etiologies.
The index is weighted by the various categories including disease occurrence, the early aberrant reporting system alarms, state occurrence and co-diagnosis.
The final score can range between 0.01 to 1, and it shows the relative ideology activity and changes over time.So, for example, there is a strong index that year-over-year PRRS and Strep suis remain as a high-ranked disease incidence, but there are also diseases such as porcine sapovirus or porcine astrovirus that were identified as potential emerging diseases.
Dr. Becton says the index allows the integration of multiple dimensions of diagnostic information into a single interpretable database and helps distinguish pathogens that consistently represent a risk and the framework can be adapted to add other diagnostic laboratories, pathogens, systems or even livestock species.Full details can be found at swinehealth.org.
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