Farmscape for April 4, 2012   (Episode 4121)

The Canadian Swine Health Board has announced the establishment of the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network.

To address gaps identified in the national surveillance needs within the Canadian hog industry, a new national swine health intelligence network is being created to help improve communication among stakeholders.

Dr. Dan Hurnik, the chair of the Canadian Swine Health Board's Long Term Disease Risk Management Committee and a member of the faculty of the Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island, says the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network will be a set of eyes that will pick up new disease trends early.

Clip-Dr. Dan Hurnik-Canadian Swine Health Board:
When we're trying to manage and prevent disease, if you can detect it very early your response plans can reduce the potential economic damage that a disease would cause by putting in preventative measures quite early.

If you can identify something that's just starting, work with the biosecurity people to make specific recommendations to prevent its spread and make sure that information is known across the country, we can hopefully limit the spread of a disease that will cost the industry a lot of money.

One of the key goals that we want to do, especially given the ability to communicate now electronically, it's much easier than it used to be, the project planners are looking at creating a social network among veterinarians so information can be discussed quickly among veterinarians in a social network and then the significance of the findings can be analyzed by epidemiologists and we can measure the consequence or potential consequence of some of these outbreaks.

Dr. Hurnik says we didn't have such a system during the Circovirus outbreak in 2005 so setting up meetings to plan a response took a long time.

He says hopefully the intelligence network will recognize the problem, coordinate meetings and take action where necessary sooner and the response time will be much shorter.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       * Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council