Oftentimes, the process is more important than the results. There’s no question the 2025 Swine Health Information Center (SHIC) Plan of Work lays out a multitude of important topics to tackle in the year ahead. But for SHIC Executive Director Megan Niederwerder, DVM, the process that goes into developing this plan is just as, if not more important.
“The whole premise of SHIC is to be responsive and nimble to best serve the U.S. pork industry,” Niederwerder explains. “We want to be able to shift resources when and where they’re needed. This consistency with the annual plan of work process allows us to ask those questions to stakeholders on a routine basis.”
Each year, SHIC works with producers and stakeholders to solicit ideas and research priorities to best know how to delegate resources to help the industry. Niederwerder finds the stakeholder engagement process of talking to producers, veterinarians, diagnostic labs and state pork associations incredibly valuable.
“We have listening sessions where we ask, ‘Where are your emerging disease priorities? What are you seeing in your herds? Where can SHIC provide value to you in designating resources towards a problem or an issue or perhaps explore the use of a new technology?’” she explains.
Having that constant line of communication with stakeholders is really important, because SHIC needs ears and eyes on day-to-day operations so SHIC’s plan of work can adjust as needed to changing pressures in the industry.
Big Topics in 2025
As you look through the plan of work, a theme emerges. Typically, biosecurity is thought about from an on-farm perspective, Niederwerder says. But this year, you’ll see a different biosecurity theme.
“Our plan of work this year has really identified and prioritized some new areas that we can consider from an industry perspective about biosecurity risk areas,” she adds. “Our goal is to be able to then develop new tools and technologies to better protect the swine industry.”
One of those areas is looking at the packing plant and how the swine industry can assist in preparedness, Niederwerder says. Research will look at novel tools and technologies for cleaning and disinfecting lairage for continuity of business if there is an emerging disease and the packer is affected, allowing business continuity for pork producers.
“Another aspect is how do we decrease the risk of pathogen contamination at that trailer-harvest plant interface?” she says. “This research centers around reducing the risk of trailer contamination after market pigs are unloaded, so that the trailer does not serve as a mechanism or route for pathogen transmission back to the farm.”
They will also look at cull sow or secondary market biosecurity. How can the industry better monitor disease in that population and reduce the risk of disease transmission back to the farm from secondary markets?
SHIC also seeks to develop new tools for on-farm diagnostics, especially looking at air sampling or environmental sampling or even wastewater sampling, she says.
“We are thinking about ways to automate sample collection to reduce labor required,” Niederwerder says.
She’s also excited about some new tools that will come out later this year, including an online global disease dashboard. It will give producers and veterinarians the option to select a country or to select a disease, and see what’s happening in a given country around the world.
Here’s a look at the 2025 priorities:
- Improve Swine Health Information
- Domestic disease monitoring through veterinary diagnostic laboratory data collation.
- Domestic disease monitoring through voluntary reporting to the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project.
- Strategic summary of SHIC swine health and disease work-to-date.
- Webinars to inform veterinarians and producers about emerging swine health issues.
- Maintaining up-to-date swine disease fact sheets.
- Ensure timely and valuable communications across all stakeholder audiences.
- Monitor and Mitigate Risks to Swine Health
- Real-time assessment of high-risk product importation and traveler entry at borders.
- Global disease monitoring to identify and inform international swine disease risks.
- Foster information sharing with government and allied industry through international animal health organizations.
- Transport biosecurity through targeting a regional or production phase approach.
- Designing effective cleaning and disinfection tools and practices for swine transport trailers.
- Packing plant biocontainment to reduce risk of trailer contamination at the dock.
- Packing plant tools for effective cleaning and disinfection of lairage for business continuity.
- Personnel movement as a risk of disease spread between farms.
- Enhancing biosecurity of mortality management practices to reduce disease transmission back to farm.
- Novel ventilation technologies for cost-effective bioexclusion and biocontainment.
- Cull sow and secondary market biosecurity and disease surveillance.
- Multi-species livestock operations and backyard farms as a risk for emerging disease spillover.
- Role of rendering in emerging disease transmission and response.
- Responding to Emerging Disease
- Emergency disease preparedness and response planning in coordination with state, federal and industry stakeholders.
- Monitoring risk of African swine fever recombinant genotype I/II virus to US prevention and preparedness.
- Rapid deployment of research funds for a newly emerging disease.
- Investigating production and swine health impacts of porcine sapovirus as an emerging pathogen.
- Hemorrhagic tracheitis syndrome (HTS) as a potential emerging disease in US swine.
- Utilizing Standardized Outbreak Investigations to identify high risk events for pathogen entry.
- Identification of early disease outbreak warning signals from industry data.
- Surveillance and Discovery of Emerging Disease
- Wastewater sampling for emerging disease surveillance.
- Tongue tip fluids as a diagnostic sample to target risk-based mortality populations.
- Genome-based diagnostic technologies for emerging disease detection and forensic analysis.
- Diagnostic fee support to assist in early detection of emerging disease.
- Population and environmental surveillance technologies to improve and automate diagnostic testing.
- Increasing utility of VDL submissions as an effective surveillance stream for detection of emerging disease.
- Investigate the clinical relevance and epidemiology of newly identified agents in VDL submissions associated with swine disease.
- Swine Disease Matrix
- Updating bacterial and viral swine disease matrices to prioritize swine pathogens.
- Using the swine bacterial and viral disease matrices as guidelines for research to enhance swine disease diagnostic capabilities.
Find the 10th anniversary 2025 SHIC Plan of Work here.
Get Engaged with SHIC
Niederwerder encourages producers to stay in touch. Sign up for SHIC’s monthly newsletter. Get involved in working groups to provide input on SHIC’s plan of work process. Check out the website’s stakeholder input mechanisms to share ideas. And, of course, Niederwerder encourages producers to reach out to SHIC staff as priorities emerge on farm.
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