Changes in how the Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network presents swine health surveillance data will allow direct comparisons of what veterinarians’ report compared to what the diagnostic labs report. 
As part of its swine disease monitoring and surveillance efforts, the CWSHIN surveys veterinarians quarterly conduct quarterly conference calls with veterinarians to discuss issues and collect and assess data collected from Canada’s diagnostics labs. 
CWSHIN Manager Dr. Jette Christensen said a noticeably significant milestone is that results from the clinical impressions survey and the laboratory results show up on the same chart. 
“With the new clinical impressions survey and much better-organized laboratory data, we can look at the trends in disease occurrence from the clinical impression survey and the laboratory data together in one picture, in one chart.” 
It’s a much better starting point to look at changes in trends if there’s an agreement between what the practitioners see in the herds and what the laboratory data shows. 
While no exciting big news, the long process to get to this point makes it doable. There’s nothing exceptional on the disease occurrence or the results, but they can compare more detailed information over the next quarters.  
Dr.  Christensen said most of the pigs produced in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. are part of the region’s swine health monitoring and surveillance programs. 
“We invite all practitioners that we know of that do swine work in our region, some are big practices with many veterinarians doing the swine work, and some are smaller mixed practices that only have a few swine clients,” she said. 
From their list of practitioners who get the survey, 76 per cent contributed to CWSHIN in 2020, indicating an excellent representation of the western region’s commercial swine sector. Including about 14 hundred premises served by these practices. That is very close to the number of premises registered in PigTrace, more than with the Canadian Quality Assurance and less than farms with swine registered in Statistics Canada. Because some farms registered in StatsCan are smallholders and may only have a few pigs. This means results from the clinical impressions survey cover most of the commercial swine sector in the region, which is excellent news. 
Another new project the Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network is launching this month focuses on African Swine Fever preparedness and the control of Strep suis. The Network allocated resources to a new activity, ‘Targeted Emerging Issue Investigations,’ under which they can look into further detail of health issues flagged as new or important. This includes two projects. One is on African Swine Fever risk analysis to get some better knowledge on where they might see the first introduction of African Swine Fever in the region. Would that, for example, be in smallholders in B.C., would it be wild pigs on the prairies, or would it be in commercial farms in Manitoba or other combinations of wild pigs, commercial or smallholders? 
That project will be in several weeks. The results should enable the industry to better allocate ASF preparedness resources and the next for African Swine Fever surveillance in the region. 
The other one is that Streptococcus suis and Streptococcus are frequent organisms that show up in the laboratories. The project will help them determine what’s going on. 
“We need to know if there are better control methods that can help the producers and the practitioners to control clinical disease, mortalities for step suis.” •
— By Harry Siemens