After pioneering a SHIC-funded system to improve swine health by reporting pathogen test results from public veterinary diagnostic laboratories across the Midwest, a team led by faculty from Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine has plans to glean even more insight from the vast data set. A new three-year, $1 million grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has been awarded to enable the Swine Disease Reporting System team and collaborators expand how this data is utilized to inform disease trends and improve swine health.
With a grant from SHIC, the SDRS was founded six years ago by Dr. Daniel Linhares, Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine. The goal was to compile and analyze testing data from veterinary diagnostic labs to detect disease trends as they emerged, providing producers with an early warning system to prompt preventative responses such as increasing monitoring and heightening biosecurity measures.
"It gives producers, practitioners and other stakeholders timely information about regional disease movement and risk that helps them manage the health of their own herds," SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg said.
With nearly 73 million hogs in the US, the testing data collected by SDRS is substantial – more than 530,000 individual results in 2022, per Dr. Giovani Trevisan, Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine. "With the grant, we’re going to dive deeper into the data to provide even more value to producers," said Trevisan, projector director for the NIFA award.
The NIFA funding will support advanced genetic analysis to identify new variations of pathogens as they develop, leveraging what Trevisan said is one of the largest known private collections of genetic disease data. That will provide even earlier warnings about new swine health risks.
"We’re going to continue to see new strains, we just don’t know where or when. We want to be ahead of it whenever the next one comes," Dr. Linhares said.
Trevisan said expanded data analysis also will help determine if there are geographic areas where SDRS should seek more information. And there may be other novel uses for the data set. Part of the grant involves educating veterinary medicine students and graduate students in other fields on SDRS’s trove of testing results, encouraging them to use it for conducting data-driven research or improving on-farm decision-making.
"We want to take the knowledge we’ve been building since 2017 and transfer it to students to help society," Trevisan said.
The grant also will fine-tune how the disease trend data is shared with producers. SDRS experts will meet with hog farmers and other industry partners to study possible improvements in how the information is communicated. "It’s a two-way road. It’s not just us downloading information to producers and industry stakeholders. We want their feedback," Dr. Linhares said.
The initiative started with the labs at Iowa State and the University of Minnesota, collecting testing data for one pathogen. Now the consortium has five members – including the state-run lab in Ohio and labs at South Dakota State University and Kansas State University – and tracks seven pathogens, with breakdowns by location, age, farm type and specimen type. The anonymized data is designed for spotting macrotrends and can’t be tracked back to particular producers or labs.
"The SDRS provides that foundational data to educate the industry about pathogen activity in swine populations," Dr. Linhares said. "For the first time, it’s systematic and reported widely. It’s really a matter of knowing what’s out there and understanding that you’re not in the dark."
Data and analysis are shared monthly in an online dashboard and a podcast hosted by Drs. Linhares and Trevisan. SHIC, a pork checkoff-funded industry organization charged with monitoring swine diseases, provides SDRS with ongoing operational funding and publishes a monthly report and newsletter including the data. Dr. Sundberg said the five SDRS labs handle at least 96% of U.S. swine diagnostic testing, making their aggregated data of great interest to the industry.
The Swine Health Information Center, launched in 2015 with Pork Checkoff funding, protects and enhances the health of the US swine herd by minimizing the impact of disease threats through preparedness, coordinated communications, global disease monitoring, analysis of swine health data, and targeted research investments. As a conduit of information and research, SHIC encourages sharing of its publications and research. Forward, reprint, and quote SHIC material freely. For more information, visit http://www.swinehealth.org or contact Dr. Paul Sundberg at psundberg@swinehealth.org or Dr. Megan Niederwerder at mniederwerder@swinehealth.org.