Farmscape for March 21, 2016

Research planned by the U.S. based Swine Health Information Center will improve the detection of viruses that may put the U.S. Swine herd at risk.
As part of its 2016 strategic plan, the Swine Health Information Center has allocated one million dollars to support the development of diagnostics to detect viruses at which the U.S. swine herd may be at risk.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says this effort will focus on viral detection.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
Swine Disease Metrics is what we've termed it.
It's a list of 40 some viruses at which we are at risk.
Some of those are already in the country, some of them are offshore and have the potential to be imported as PED was back in 2013.
So this effort for 2016 is going to be to ensure that we have the ability to detect the high priority viruses that we've identified from which we are at risk.
Some of these viruses are not in the country now so this is a cooperative effort among the veterinary diagnostic labs, the researchers.
They have to have permits through USDA for either the reagents or the tests or the viral components in order to be able to do this research or we do the research offshore so it's going to take a lot of coordination by the diagnostic labs, by the Swine Health Information Center along with the cooperation and the permitting of the federal animal health officials in order to be able to get this research done.
It's going to be a big effort but we're going to get that started in 2016 so can get that done just as quickly as possible so we have that ability to detect these viruses should they get here.

Dr. Sundberg says this effort will be a very important part of the ability to respond to something that may come into the country.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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