A Swine Health Information Center-funded project at Iowa State University developed a data-driven etiology index to help characterize the relative activity of endemic swine pathogens in the US. The work, led by Drs. Giovani Trevisan and Daniel Linhares, uses confirmed tissue-based diagnoses from the Iowa State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory to rank disease activity and identify emerging changes over time.
This initiative aimed to provide a transparent, automated and reproducible method to help veterinarians, producers and stakeholders prioritize disease threats based on real-world diagnostic data. The research analyzed 59,950 porcine tissue cases submitted to the ISU-VDL between 2020 and 2024, including evaluation of 81 bacterial, viral, parasitic and metabolic/intoxication etiologies.
Rather than relying solely on the number of diagnoses, the resulting index combines four measures: disease occurrence, co-diagnosis with other etiologies, geographic distribution across states and Early Aberration Reporting System (EARS) alarms. The variables are weighted according to their contribution to the overall index, with disease occurrence receiving the greatest weight (0.50), followed by EARS alarms (0.26), state occurrence (0.15), and co-diagnosis (0.09).
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