Outbreak Investigation Instrument Will Help Pork Industry Be Prepared, Holtkamp Says

The goal of the outbreak investigation instrument is to improve biosecurity for endemic diseases and be better prepared to respond to the introduction of transboundary diseases.
The goal of the outbreak investigation instrument is to improve biosecurity for endemic diseases and be better prepared to respond to the introduction of transboundary diseases.
(SHIC)

A standardized outbreak investigation instrument is now available to help producers and veterinarians. The goal? To use the outbreak investigation instrument to improve biosecurity for endemic diseases and be better prepared to respond to the introduction of transboundary diseases. The new instrument is available for download and use from the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC) website and a web-based version will be launched this spring.

Derald Holtkamp, an Iowa State University professor, led the development of this instrument with funding by SHIC. A working group of 12 academics and swine veterinarians helped develop the  instrument.

The downloadable version is a fillable form that upon completion could be submitted to a program administrator at ISU, SHIC explained in a release. It could also be used for farm/system outbreak investigations without submitting. Every submission will strengthen the confidential, without identifiers, database that can be mined to find industry trends and opportunities to learn from the collective experience and strengthen industry-wide biosecurity. When the web-based version is available in the coming weeks, veterinarians will contact the ISU-based administrator for access, a one-time process. SHIC will provide the administrator’s contact information once the web-based version is released.

“I feel really good about the instrument and approach,” Holtkamp said in the release. “The reason for doing this remains trying to be better prepared to respond to the introduction of transboundary disease. However, the idea is, it’s not good enough just to have the instrument available. We need veterinarians and producers using it, getting practice with it, knowing how it works. Opportunity for this is with endemic diseases like PRRS, PEDV, Senecavirus A, diseases we already have.”

The new, standardized outbreak investigation instrument was built from, and expanded on, an existing investigation tool. Expert input and conversation led to changing some terms and creating additions.

“We made a lot of incremental changes that really improved it a great deal,” Holtkamp said.

Historically, producers have asked veterinarians to conduct outbreak investigations. However, students are not always taught how to do this in veterinary school, he added.

“Outbreaks are crises. Usually, in the aftermath of crises is when people are most interested in finding out what went wrong and asking, how can I prevent this in the future,” Holtkamp said.

Even though there has always been great motivation to determine the cause of outbreaks, until now a standardized instrument was not available for the process.

“Here’s an instrument you can use that has a lot of investment in time and expertise to do investigations a lot better,” Holtkamp said. “Producers want veterinarians to use the best available tools.”

Investigations are designed to learn where producers should devote time and effort and where to prioritize the most significant biosecurity hazards on the farm. A completed investigation instrument results in two reports. The full report captures everything learned during the investigation to highlight the most significant hazards and a summary report helps producers prioritize where they would like to invest their resources in biosecurity control measures, SHIC noted.

Holtkamp disagrees with the saying "we learn from our mistakes."

“There’s no guarantee just because we make mistakes, we’re going to learn from them,” he said. “With this new instrument, we can learn faster from outbreaks that are fundamentally mistakes.”

He leads the SHIC Rapid Response Program. In the future, members of Rapid Response Teams will be trained with the standardized outbreak investigation instrument. They would then be able to set up and conduct investigations using the web-based outbreak investigation instrument, SHIC explained.

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