By Bruce Cochrane
The Executive Director of the U.S. based National Swine Health Information Center reports the new agency is now at the point where it's ready to begin implementing its work.
The U.S. based National Swine Health Information Center was created to develop an international swine health intelligence network to track swine diseases globally, establish research programs to prepare for disease threats, and facilitate communications among producers and animal care specialists.
Executive director Dr. Paul Sundberg says two working groups are now being formed.
Dr. Paul Sundberg-National Swine Health Information Center:
One will be a Swine Health Monitoring and Analysis Group and that working group is going to be charged with looking over the hill and assessing foreign and trans-boundary production diseases that have the potential for getting into the U.S..
That piece of their work is going to feed into the prioritization of our research work.
Those participants will deliberate and list for us the most likely high risk viruses to get into the country.
The second working group is going to be a Swine Health Preparedness Group.
That one will take the information about the foreign animal diseases risks and they will conduct the research.
They will gather the proposals for research, they'll review them and they will recommend them for funding.
That will be a working group that will be research focussed, and at the same time, it's going to have some responsibility in helping in the center's activities and responsibilities in a response plan for when if and when these viruses get into the country.
Dr. Sundberg says both groups will be made up of subject matter experts as well as producers and others who can provide producer involvement and producer oversight to the funding and the activities of the center.
Source: Farmscape