A new web-based app has been introduced to allow veterinarians to request an investigation under the Swine Health Information Center's Standardized Outbreak Investigation Program.
The Swine Health Information Center's Standardized Outbreak Investigation Program is a rapid response system under which swine disease investigators can be dispatched to infected farms within 72 hours of being invited.
SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says when the program was introduced earlier this year a downloadable standardized outbreak investigation Word-based form was used to report outbreaks but now, a web-based application is available.
Quote-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
The web-based application is the next step to the word document that our investigators would take onto the farms with them when they went out to do an investigation.This will enable people to enter their data into a web database real time without having to run it through a word document.
What we're after and we're hopeful is that the industry will use this web-based application for a standardised way to do outbreak investigations and also to proactively look at their biosecurity and do an investigation prior to outbreak, to enter that data into this secure website and that will help us build a database from which we can get information about common biosecurity lapses and also about biosecurity enhancements that will help everybody.
One of the things that we know is that the more standardised that we can get the process, the more usable the data is and the information is because it can be compiled and it can be mined.We want to try to help the North American pork industry by doing that type of program and providing people with good biosecurity reviews.
Dr. Sundberg says to access the web-based application veterinarians will need to contact the Iowa State University administer at soip@iastate.edu to request a user name and password.
Source : Farmscape.ca