USDA Grant to Help Expand Usefulness of Swine Disease Reporting System

A three-year, one-million-dollar grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture will help expand the use of data collected through the Swine Disease Reporting System to identify disease trends and improve swine health

The Swine Disease Reporting System was introduced to standardise the way that U.S. veterinary diagnostic labs report diagnostic test results and allow those results to be compiled, analysed and compared.

Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says USDA has allocated one million dollars to Iowa State University and the Swine Disease Reporting program over three years.

 

 “A portion of the grant is going to go to advanced genetic analysis, looking at the different strains of pathogens that come in”

 

 

“That money is going to go to helping to enhance the monitoring of the health and detect new diseases in the U.S. swine herd.

“A portion of it is going to go to advanced genetic analysis, looking at the different strains of pathogens that come in, not just the pathogen test yes or no, but also genetically analysing those strains, those pathogens to see if we can detect occurrences of new strains or perhaps there is evolution and motion of strains that we currently have.

“The second thing it will do is it will offer better regional information.

“Currently we offer general state information and this is going to put some new tools in our SDS program to enable some better regional information coming.

“This is important to the U.S. industry because we really operate multistate now.

“It’s not so much state by state but it is within regions and it’s multistate so we’re going to be able to mine that data for enhanced regional disease information.“

Dr. Sundberg says the funding will also support the training of new veterinarians on how to mine that data, be part of that data and use it more effectively to help them in their practice and to help the producers they serve be more profitable.

Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers