Building capacity is the focus of the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project (MSHMP) as it enters its seventh year of operation. In addition to monitoring swine disease incidence and detecting emerging pathogens, MSHMP will also be digging into pig farm population growth, emerging pathogen tool finetuning, transport data usability and platform building for project information sharing.
MSHMP pursues the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC)’s mission by following these overarching objectives:
• Monitor trends in pathogen incidence and prevalence.
• Conduct prospective monitoring of PRRS virus sequence evolution and impact.
• Develop capacity to capture and analyze movement data.
• Expand participation of producers to allow for all the opportunity of access to timely detailed information on disease occurrence and streamline public access to information relevant to the industry.
Similar to years past, MSHMP’s commitment to the U.S. swine industry will remain the collection, analysis and report generation and sharing of disease occurrence metrics, explains Paul Sundberg, executive director of SHIC.
“This ongoing process has allowed MSHMP to conduct complementary projects, share data with producers on a more granular level contributing to further understanding trends in the nation, but most importantly, stimulate cooperation among producers and practitioners,” he says.
An example of this was the recent emergence of the new porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) variant that rapidly evolved, Sundberg points out.
“Without the MSHMP platform metrics, the epidemiologic curve and maps could not have been generated and shared with the U.S. industry,” he says.
Year seven’s newly proposed projects fit within each overarching goal below. Each project shares the goal of being applicable for a foreign animal disease (FAD) emergency.
Goal 1: Begin exploring data pathways to quantify and characterize the occurrence of disease in the growing pig herd population.
Goal 2: Develop a methodology to identify new PRRS virus strains circulating as part of a cluster through frequency and similarity.
Goal 3: Create and characterize the dissemination network patterns through pig movement of the newly emerged PRRS virus lineage 1-4-4 1C in a production system and assess regional risk of these newly placed pigs.
Goal 4: Develop and launch the first publicly available MSHMP website to optimize project output dissemination within both the participant and industry communities.
In addition to capacity building, MSHMP proposes to create value through conducting practical, short-term research on diseases important to the industry. This will include monitoring the incidence and prevalence of PRRS virus, PEDV, and potentially other important pathogens, Sundberg says.
“MSHMP will use the diagnostic results in conjunction with management information and interventions to publish ways for producers to limit the impact of important swine diseases. And by adding phylogenetic information to the data routinely collected by MSHMP, the project will contribute to producer capabilities to early identify, interpret, and react to PRRS outbreaks, new virus incursions, and changes in risk at both system and regional levels,” he explains.
Ultimately, this work is designed to help answer one of the most important PRRS research questions related to virus evolution, emergence, and transmission at the regional and system levels, while at the same time preparing the basic tools needed for a rapid response in the face of an FAD.
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