The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center says, by standardizing swine disease outbreak investigations, it will be possible to compare outbreaks from farm to farm across the country.
The new Standardized Outbreak Investigation Instrument, which is now downloadable on the Swine Health Information Center website, is the subject of a SHIC Talk Podcast.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg explains an effort has been made to consolidate ideas about outbreak investigations into one instrument that is standardised enough that to allow comparisons and learn from farm to farm starting with PRRS and then PED.
Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
You can look at one farm and here's the things that may be going on but when you put farm to farm to farm together you can collate and put together the information you see from a variety of different places and that gives you a bigger picture of what's going on.
Dr. Derald Holtkamp at Iowa State University is using our SHIC outbreak investigation instrument in our rapid response team investigations.
When a producer asks for help for understanding how any virus or any disease got onto a farm, we have a network of people across the country that are available to be on that farm looking for the outbreak cause within 72 hours after being invited onto the farm to do this investigation.
We started with PRRS and that was one step.
PED was the second and the rapid response team is the third. This standardised outbreak investigation is a fourth step and it's more of a modification and evolution of outbreak investigations.
We're looking to try to standardise outbreak investigations no matter who's doing them across the country so we can gather better information about biosecurity vulnerability.
The Standardized Outbreak Investigation Instrument and the SHIC Talk Podcast can be accessed through the Swine Health Information Center web site at swinehealth.org.
Source : Farmscape.ca