SHIC Releases Three Updated Swine Disease Fact Sheets

Farmscape for June 14, 2021

Full Interview 8:33 Listen

The Swine Health Information Center is encouraging pork sector stakeholders to take advantage of its Swine Disease Fact Sheet library.
The Swine Health Information Center’s Swine Disease Fact Sheet library contains information on the diagnosis and treatment, prevention and control, pathogenicity and transmission and cleaning and disinfection for about 25 different viral infections that affect swine. SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says these fact sheets, which were first authorised in 2015 to 2016, are available to assist pork producers, swine practitioners, and diagnosticians when an emerging disease is found.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
There is a variety of those different fact sheets that need to be updated. We kind of keep an eye on that but we’re doing a very intensive look at the different fact sheets to make sure they have the most current research in there. For example, we just released three new ones, Chikungunya, Menangle and Sapovirus fact sheets. For producers, for the most part, if you have a Chikungunya fact sheet for example, a producer is probably not going to access that and read that, unless there is an infection. That’s really the idea here, is to be prepared.
It’s not so much to get out there and tell people about this virus or that virus and what its epidemiology is because it’s not really a learning moment.

The teachable moment comes when a new virus gets into the pig herds and that teachable moment means that we have to have resources available for people to have information right then so they can find out things about public health, things about the infection, the treatments, the cleaning and disinfection, the pathogenesis and transmission, all of those things that they need to know right then to be able to act to help control any new outbreaks.

The latest up to date versions of these fact sheets can be accessed through the Swine Health Information Center’s web site at swinehealth.org under the emerging disease information tab.

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