The Executive Director, Dr. Paul Sundberg of the Swine Health Information Center said the cooperation of contacts on the ground around the world is helping the swine sector become more responsive to the threat of disease.
To help contain the spread of diseases that affect swine the University of Minnesota in partnership with the Swine Health Information Center is tracking swine diseases both domestically and globally through official government sources and a network of contacts on the ground.
Dr. Sundberg said one of the more rewarding aspects of this initiative is the level of cooperation.
“When we contact people for those soft sources in other countries, for the most part, they’re very willing to give us a heads up on what’s going on,” he said. “They’re very willing to talk to us and to give us their intel about the animal health, the swine health status within their country. So there are several contacts, and there’s a network.”
Sundberg thinks the best term would be a network of contacts around the world in practically all of the continents, in Europe in Asia, in southeast Asia, in South America.
“Often the official word out of countries is either late, it takes time for that to happen, or it might not accurately reflect the current situation that’s on the ground and happening,” he said. “The value of that network of contacts is extremely high because that gives us the real-time status of diseases and swine health in different countries and different areas of the world.”
Dr. Sundberg said the objective is to help understand what the disease risks are, and how we can prevent them, if not, how can we better respond.
Dr. Sundberg put it another way. “It’s a fairly simple goal and expectation. The goal is to look over the hill and see what’s going on around the US and North America. To be better prepared should something get here, or and very importantly, perhaps we can prevent things from getting into the country. The objective is to help understand what the risks are, how we can prevent them, and if we can’t, then at least how we can most effectively respond. That’s why we’re looking at global diseases around the world.”
For instance, in cooperation with the University of Minnesota, they are monitoring animal health events internationally, and that takes two forms.

“One is official, or hard sources, the OIE and governments themselves put out notices about animal health, so we’re making sure that we monitor those,” he said. “But also importantly, there are what we term soft sources, and those are unofficial sources that we have contacts with people on the ground in those countries. Sometimes that information isn’t the same as what comes out of the government reports. Besides, the other pieces of information are our international monitoring reports that come out of Canada and the UK.”
Dr. John Carr, International Livestock Consultant and Veterinarian said one of the issues that concern him is governments wait far too long to give an official report of the status of a particular disease.
“We had a Varroa mite outbreak in Australia. It’s a gross little mite type thing that lives on anything. And it took the Australian government six weeks before they publicly said it. And these things spread. It’s all about, well … We need to know, we need to know. There needs to be almost like a secondary level of, we hope not but it might be,” said Carr. “If you take Russia for an example and look at parts of Russia and the way African Swine Fever spread in Russia in an area near the Crimea, but it’s on the Russian side. They had something like 400,000 pigs in 2007, and by 2012-13 they’re down to 35,000, 90 per cent kill. But the 35,000 all live on farms while the 370,000 all lived in people’s homes. I stick by my assessment that a farm, with 500 sows or more should have less than a 10 per cent chance of getting ASF. Whereas, yours and my pig, that lives in our house will have a 90 per cent chance of getting ASF.”
Dr. Sundberg said their primary interest right now is ASF but includes a classical swine fever, foot and mouth disease.
“Hopefully this year we will be expanding. We’re putting some information in the monthly reports about PRRS, and about PED virus. And about other things that we learn about other production diseases that are going around the world,” he said. “Because learning that lesson from PED, it circulated for a couple of years before it got to North America. We want to ensure that even if it’s not classic foreign animal disease, and it’s a production disease, that we have a heads up on things that are going on around the world.” •
— By Harry Siemens