The U.S. pork sector is planning a project aimed at identifying and closing potential gaps in efforts to prevent foreign animal disease. The American Association of Swine Veterinarians, the National Pork Board, the National Pork Producers Council and the Swine Health Information Center have called for proposals to identify gaps in U.S. pork industry national biosecurity that could result in the entry of diseases foreign to the U.S. pork sector.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says the call is another component of efforts to prevent and prepare for African Swine Fever.
Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
The objective is to do as comprehensive a look as we can into the different components of our national biosecurity system, all the way from imports of products to movement of pigs to marketing to feral pigs and to things even as far as being able to feed plate waste to pigs and that type of activity. What we're asking is for a company, a risk assessment company, a university to give us a very comprehensive look at the national biosecurity system with all of the different pieces and then prioritise it.
As those things are identified, being able to put them in order of highest risk. Maybe we'll find out that we have addressed that risk and we can go on to the next one but we want to make sure that we also prioritise the issues so we can see that we have a good structure to what we're paying attention to.
There are a lot of things that are going on but we don't really have a systematic compiling of the different factors that affect our national biosecurity. We thought that maybe giving it some structure would better help us to be able to asses the effectiveness of the different biosecurity components and probably uncover weak spots that we probably need to work on.
Source : Farmscape