Farmscape for June 4, 2015

The National Pork Board has outlined plans for a new $15,000,000Swine Health Information Center.
Yesterday, as part of World Pork Expo 2015, the National Pork Board announced the creation of the new Swine Health Information Center.
National Pork Board senior vice president science and technology Dr. Paul Sundberg, who will assume the role of the center's executive director in July, says the new body came about as a result of lessons learned from the U.S. pork industry's experience with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-National Pork Board:
The National Pork Board has devoted $15,000,000 of check-off funds over a 5 year period to form the center and the center is mandated with really three buckets of responsibility.
The first thing is to form an international, a global intelligence network that will help better inform us about diseases that are circulating in swine around the world so we're better prepared with information.
That's the second piece, information and diagnostics.
One of the things that we learned from the PED experience, even though we reacted as best as anybody could, was that we had to develop the diagnostics needed to be able to find and address that virus when it got here.
We want to be better prepared with diagnostics next time.
The third thing that the center is going to do is help producers form an information sharing network within the industry in the U.S. so we can manage diseases, manage endemic diseases that we have and emerging diseases as they come.
That's another lesson we learned from PED, that information sharing is always helpful when we get something new, when we have a focus that we need to manage something and so we're going to look at how best to form that type of foundation for information.

Dr. Sundberg views the Swine Health Information Center as an unprecedented opportunity to help producers and veterinarians address the health of their pigs directly on farm.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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