Swine Health Information Center Mandate Extended to End of 2027

The National Pork Board has extended the Mandate of the Swine Heath Information Center to the end of 2027. The Swine Health Information Center monitors and tracks the movement of swine disease domestically and globally to prevent and prepare for emerging swine health issues. The National Pork Board has committed 15 million dollars of Pork Checkoff funds to extend that mandate through 2027.

Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg explains SHIC works to protect and enhance the health of the U.S. swine herd through coordinated global disease monitoring, targeted research to minimize the impact of future disease threats and swine health data analysis.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:

This issue of emerging diseases, of PRRS in the 1980s, of circovirus in the 1990s and we had an outbreak and epidemic of PED in 2013. In 2015 the Board of Directors for the National Pork Board said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

Rather than responding to emerging diseases and just letting it hit us and trying to control it and trying to respond as best we can, let's see if we can do a better job of getting in front of it and let's do some monitoring of emerging diseases, let's see what we can do to prevent them, let's see what we need to do to make sure that we're prepared.

If prevention isn't successful, we need to be prepared and so we need to make sure that our diagnostic labs and our veterinarians, our producers are prepared for things that might come, not just in general emerging diseases, but monitor for specific things that may be coming at us. Then that will help with response and recovery.

That was the geneses of the Swine Health information Center in 2015. That Board of Directors for the National Pork Board gave 15 million dollars for a five-year experiment to see if we could do things differently as far as emerging diseases.