Change is inevitable. As hard as farms work to stay on top of biosecurity protocols amidst changes in staffing, breakdowns are going to happen. Lisa Becton, DVM and associate director of the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC), remembers when she was in practice years ago how challenging it could be to assess disease outbreaks consistently.
“We would all go out to our farms and thought we had everything covered, but things can slip through the cracks,” Becton says. “When we have a lot of workers coming in and out, it’s always good to have one standardized way that we can go through and assess farms when a disease outbreak does happen. Then, whether it’s one farm or 10 farms, hopefully your output is going to be comparable across all of those farms.”
In 2021, SHIC funded the development of the Standardized Outbreak Investigation Program (SOIP). The program and tools were developed in response to an industry need for consistency in data collection and results across different investigators, outbreaks and farms, Becton explains.
The web-based application has been available for nearly two years after development by program lead, Derald Holtkamp of Iowa State University, along with colleague Kate Dion. It has been endorsed by the American Association of Swine Veterinarians Board of Directors for use in conducting outbreak investigations for swine pathogens. A web-based version for the standardized application was launched in 2024 with funding from SHIC, increasing the ease by which veterinarians can use and capture data from investigations in a secure database.
Invaluable Insights for Producers
Disease outbreak investigations offer producers opportunities to identify and prioritize biosecurity hazards. As Holtkamp says, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
While outbreaks are undeniably a crisis, they also present a chance to learn. Becton says the learning isn’t automatic, however. When outbreak investigations are conducted comprehensively and systematically with the goal of identifying biosecurity hazards within the production system, they consistently generate insights that make the time and resources invested worthwhile.
The biggest excitement is understanding where the challenges lie and where we can improve biosecurity, Becton points out.
“Let’s take mortality management for example,” she says. “Nobody likes doing it. Because of this, we’ve worked on developing a mechanism to do that in a biosecure way, because this area can also be an inherent risk to the farm.”
Another risk is employees, but of course employees are necessary on a farm.
“There is no question we need our employees, but you also have to come back and ask, what do we do on a day-to-day basis to reduce the risk of disease introduction through people going in and out? What can we do to avoid a potential disease outbreak?” she says. “The SOIP is a really great way to be able to look at all the events on the farm, compare it against what is seen on the aggregate scale, and hone in on what you’re doing so you can prevent a future outbreak.”
The amount of data can be overwhelming, so Becton advises taking things in little bites at a time.
“Even with this investigation, how do you get it into bites?” she says. This program doesn’t require veterinarians to do all the work – there are many steps producers and their team can take on their own to gather the necessary data.
After nearly two years of the SOIP program, key findings are surfacing that can help producers prevent future disease outbreaks. As of October 2025, the SOIP database contained data for 87 completed investigations on sow farms across 24 different companies. Most of the investigations were done for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).
“While biosecurity risks vary by producer and farm, analyzing data at the industry level reveals where time and resources may need to be prioritized to strengthen biosecurity,” SHIC says.
Some of the findings include:
- Each entry event where a pathogen-carrying agent enters the farm poses a risk. Employee entry is the most frequent entry event (about 6,158 events annually for a 4,000-sow farm).
- Swine movements (cull sows and weaned pigs) were most often assigned a high hazard rating, followed by mortality removal, employee entry, and repairs inside barns.
- Outbreak investigations not only identify biosecurity hazards but also highlight systemic weaknesses in execution, planning and monitoring. Industry-wide outbreak investigation data enables prioritization of resources to strengthen biosecurity.
- Many aspects of the production process are not fully understood by veterinarians or production managers, making biosecurity hazard identification challenging. This knowledge gap is even greater when critical activities are outsourced to third-party providers, such as livestock transport, loading crews or manure removal.
- Weather, holidays, employee absences, equipment breakdowns and urgent needs for supplies or equipment all occur on swine farms without exception. However, it is common to see these occurrences lead to significant biosecurity hazards. Planning for the rare or unusual is often not done. The result is too many outbreaks where the unusual happened and the personnel on the ground dealt with it the best they knew how, but created biosecurity hazards that led to an avoidable disease outbreak.
The web-based application is available to all producers and veterinarians. Access to the application can be requested via email at soip@iastate.edu. Read more from SHIC here. https://www.swinehealth.org/lessons-learned-from-shics-standardized-outbreak-investigation-program-to-date/
