A just released review shows the Swine Health Information Center helps protect and enhance the health of the U.S. swine herd by minimizing the impact of emerging disease threats through preparedness, coordinated communications, global disease monitoring, analysis of swine health data and targeted research investments.
In marking its first decade in operation, the Swine Health Information Center in its May eNewsletter outlines the highlights a program review that looks at "10 Years of Return on Pork Producers’ Investment."Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says the review shows SHIC effectively balances practicality with innovation to advance disease prevention, preparedness and response enabling rapid action on emerging threats.
Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:
The target of our outcomes and research really are the producers and other industry stakeholders such as veterinarians and state and federal health officials.
Our goal is to be able to provide information and resources for emerging diseases so we can detect them rapidly but also be able to prevent them and yet be prepared in the event they should be here.This information is vital because a lot of times we don't know what our challenges are and unless we investigate and monitor for these unknown risks, we don't know how to respond so it's very important to have resources that look at emerging diseases and help round out our overall ability to protect against some of these swine health threats.
There's been a lot of advancements in understanding biosecurity of growing pigs and that had been a very big research focus for us with the wean to harvest projects.A lot of projects are still underway but we have learned a lot both for site biosecurity as well as transportation biosecurity and things we can do to reduce the risks of disease transfer from plants to grow finish or even back to sow farms.Other areas really are improving our diagnostics and the ability to be able to identify some of these emerging pathogens that we don't currently have in the U.S.
Highlights of the review can be accessed through SHIC's May eNewsletter at swinehealth.org
Source : Farmscape.ca