The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center says, despite the challenges caused by COVID-19, 2020 saw substantial progress in the effort to prepare for and deal with emerging swine disease issues. The Swine Health Information Center, as part of its February eNewsletter, has released its 2020 Progress Report.
SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg explains priorities set for 2020 fell within the original mandate established when the Swine Health Information Center was formed in 2015.
Clip- Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
The mission includes monitoring for emerging diseases, both domestically and internationally and then doing targeted research to help mitigate risks to emerging diseases, to help answer questions about emerging diseases and also to analyse data.
There's a lot of data within the pork industry that is voluntarily made available to a lot of different entities and I'm putting those entities together so that data can be looked at in total and do some data mining to try to answer some emerging disease or swine health questions from the data that we have and give that back to producers.
In 2020 there were a lot of challenges with COVID-19 that impacted the ability to research, the ability to communicate, to meet with people. It was a challenging year but I think people will see that we made a lot of progress. That's been very helpful and I think very rewarding to see that we continue to make progress in that niche for helping the industry make sure that we can quickly respond to emerging diseases.
Source : Farmscape