The early sharing of swine health information is helping swine producers and veterinarians in western Canada improve their response to emerging swine disease issues.
The Canada-West Swine Health Intelligence Network, a western Canadian swine disease surveillance system, was created to help swine veterinarians share information on clinical disease in swine herds in the four western provinces.
Dr. Jette Christensen, who was named manager of the Network in April, explains CWSHIN serves swine producers and swine practitioners by helping detect emerging swine health issues as early as possible.
It could be a health issues as a disease that is always there but suddenly it flares up and becomes more of a problem or it could be a completely new disease that we don’t know anything about.
We also try to integrate information on responses to regional issues and, although CWSHIN has not been the primary actor in controlling PED over the last year or so, we’ve still created a bit of a forum to discuss how this disease could be tackled.
We’re also providing producers and veterinarians with information about baseline benchmark measurements of how much disease is out there. That helps us to recognize if something changes, if suddenly we see more respiratory diseases or diarrhea so we can figure out what’s going on.
We also try to help provide evidence that can support international trade. We have to be absolutely clear that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is the main body working on this but we can still help them in supporting some additional information that they need to keep international markets open.
~ Dr. Jette Christensen-Canada, West Swine Health Intelligence Network
CWSHIN produces two quarterly reports, one which goes to swine practitioners and one which goes to swine producers.
