The Swine Health Information Center says a modernization of the methods in place for addressing emerging swine disease challenges is needed to respond to the changing dynamics within the U.S. swine industry. Among the Swine Health Information Center’s 2017 priorities is a strengthening of swine disease surveillance. Dr. Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center, says the existing system is very effective when it comes to demonstrating negative disease status within the U.S. swine industry but it’s not as effective in terms of detecting emerging diseases as it could be and that’s one of the things the Swine Health Information Centre is working to help stimulate. [Source: Farmscape.ca, march 21, 2017]
Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
"We have a project that is helping to coordinate the diagnostic lab results among the major veterinary diagnostic labs in the U.S., coordinate their results so they can be easily compiled, easily analyzed and we can look for emerging trends. That’s one example. Another example is that we’re going look at the structure of our surveillance programs because we’ve got a different industry now than we had in the Pseudorabies eradication days for example. We’ve got different sizes of operations, we manage them differently and the question is whether or not those surveillance programs and techniques and schemes that we used back even in the 90s and early 2000s are still effective in the different industry that we have now. We may be missing things because of our historical way to look at surveillance when we owe a contemporary way to look at it in order to be able to quickly identify emerging diseases."
Dr. Sundberg says all stakeholders, including government, producers, veterinarian and the diagnostics labs have a role to play in swine disease surveillance.