SHIC Introduces New Tool to Help Veterinarians and Pork Producers Keep on Top of PRRS

The Swine Health Information Center has introduced a new tool that will further help pork producers keep on top of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome.This month's domestic swine disease monitoring report, released as part of the Swine Health Information Center's September eNewsletter, identifies increased PRRS activity in Iowa, Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota.

The monitoring report introduces educational material about the new PRRS ORF5 sequence page.SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says the page provides an explanation of how to interpret four new charts.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:

This is a great resource to help veterinarians and producers alike interpret what they are seeing for their results because sometimes this isn't really easy to interpret and if you're not used to looking at these different diagnostic reports, it's very good to have a resource that you can go through to aid in evaluation, interpretation and then application as you try to look at management of PRRS on your farm.

Other things it does provide is a forum to be able to communicate with others and other experts but it still is a really nice tool to help increase the use of PRRS ORF5 as a management tool for PRRS elimination and tracking.I don't think we can stress it enough, but it really is more important than ever to continue to focus on biosecurity in all sectors of production, but right now, especially in wean to harvest, as we see increasing activity.

And we'll have other things occurring like manure application and other things that could potentially still up other viruses, so it's never too late to improve and focus on our biosecurity on farms for disease prevention.

The Swine Health Information Center's domestic and global swine disease monitoring reports can be accessed through the SHIC website at swinehealth.org.