The U.S. swine industry realized they had to do something better after porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) virus struck the country for the first time ever and left everyone wondering what just happened, says Paul Sundberg, executive director of the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC).
“When PED hit, USDA said they weren’t sure what their regulatory authority was, but they would help us in any way they could,” Sundberg recalls. “The collective ‘we’ looked at each other and said, ‘What’s PED?’ We don’t want to repeat that.”
Not only was SHIC started after this, but SHIC began creating fact sheets to help avoid something like this happening again, he says. The fact sheets serve two main audiences: producers and the veterinarians, and academics/diagnosticians.
“The fact sheets include a CliffsNotes, if you will, and answer questions like: What is it? How is it moved from the pig? How do pigs catch it? What can you do about it? Can you treat it? How do you clean up and disinfect from it? What do I need to know now?”
But it also follows up with a literature review that is appealing to the second audience and can help provide greater depth for diagnosticians and academics digging deeper into the subject.
New Fact Sheets Available
SHIC has recently completed Emerging Disease Fact Sheet updates on getah virus, S. zooepidemicus, and Salmonella 1,4,[5],12:i:- this spring. They’ve also created more updated fact sheets on Chikungunya virus, Menangle virus, and Porcine sapovirus as well.
SHIC updates its Swine Disease Fact Sheet library continually so these expert-prepared documents are available to benefit producers, practitioners, and diagnosticians to assist when an emerging disease is found.
In the refreshed Chikungunya fact sheet, updated information on vector characteristics, testing protocol in humans, and vaccine development were incorporated. In the Menangle virus fact sheet, an improved description of the 1997 outbreak in Australia was included along with updated information on viral characteristics. The Porcine sapovirus fact sheet now discusses a recent outbreak in U.S. swine while updated prevalence and classification information for sapoviruses was added as well.
All revised fact sheets now follow this intuitive order:
- Importance
- Public health
- Infection in swine
- Treatment
- Cleaning and disinfection
- Prevention and control
- Transmission
- Pathogenesis
- Diagnosis
- Epidemiology
- Etiology
- History in swine
- Immunity
- Gaps in preparedness
“We don’t have a fact sheet on PRRS, but we have one on Chikungunya, Menangle virus and getah virus. The reason you may have to ask ‘what are those?’ is because we once had to ask, ‘what is PED?’ We didn’t know what PED was either,” Sundberg says.
SHIC is focused on being prepared with a fact sheet for those diseases that are on their list of risks.
“We want to make sure we are prepared with information should we get them,” he says. “I hope we never use them. I hope we never have to see a nipah virus outbreak in the U.S. pork industry. But boy, if we do, we’ve got it and that’s what SHIC’s supposed to do.”
For more information, visit swinehealth.org.
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