Iowa leads the United States in pork production, housing approximately one-third of the country’s swine population. This puts Iowa at great economic risk if an outbreak of African swine fever, a disease that limits international trade opportunities, were to occur anywhere in the United States. To hone emergency response plans to combat an outbreak, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship in September 2019 participated in a 4-day exercise with representatives from the other 13 top pork-producing states. This exercise involved a mock foreign animal disease response and helped to concisely summarize what pork producers could expect should a foreign animal disease be detected in Iowa.
Hennenfent A, Rumsey K, Pruisner R, Kaisand J. An overview from the 2019 Swine Fever Exercise for Agriculture Response in Iowa. JAVMA. 2020 Sep. https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.257.6.607