SHIC Domestic Swine Disease Monitoring Expanded and Extended

Dec 31, 2024

The Swine Health Information Center has added E. coli monitoring to its monthly Domestic Swine Disease Monitoring Report and extended its commitment to the report through September 2025.

The Swine Health Information Center's Domestic Swine Disease Monitoring Report provides a monthly update on what's going on with diseases being tracked in the field across the United States. SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says the information contained in the report originates from six veterinary diagnostic laboratories, accounting for approximately 96 percent of all cases submitted in the U.S.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:

This project is run by Drs. Giovani Trevisan and Daniel Linhares out of Iowa State University. They work with six different veterinary diagnostic laboratories to collect PCR data information and case results across all of the swine samples submitted.

Any time that a swine veterinary sample is submitted to the six participating laboratories, that information then gets funnelled into one system and then reported out to all producers and veterinarians on an aggregate basis.
This report does have a wide range of users and stakeholders however predominantly is looked at from producers and their herd veterinarians because they'll utilize this information make herd decisions, to understand what risks are occurring in different regions, especially if people are shipping animals across state lines or to other areas of the country.

Really it does help producers and their veterinarians make decision on biosecurity, on animal movements, even looking at treatment and vaccination strategies as they move animals into other systems. Again, the goal is to reduce the impact of diseases that are seen and to have a rapid way to identify if there are significant changes in emerging trends that are being seen for different diseases.

Dr. Becton suggests information contained in the Domestic Swine Disease Monitoring Report is critical to understanding what is the current status of a disease, where is it occurring, in what ages groups and what types of samples being submitted, be they oral fluids or other tissue samples?
To access the reports, visit swinehealth.org.

Source : Farmscape.ca

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids