New organization tackles swine health

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

The swine industry is borrowing a page from poultry organizations and setting up an organization with one part of its job being similar to the Feather Board Command Centre.

The poultry industry’s Feather Board Command Centre has been in place for three years and is the centralized emergency response unit for the poultry, egg and hatchery sectors in Ontario. It comes together when there’s a poultry industry disease emergency, such as the recent avian influenza outbreak in Oxford County, and helps the industry work with government officials and others to deal with it.

However, the pork industry’s new Swine Health Ontario organization will have a much broader job and focus.

“There will be that (Feather Board Command Centre) aspect of (emergency) response,” says Lori Moser, Swine Health Ontario manager. But Swine Health Ontario will also include all of the pillars of swine health management, such as planning, prevention, early detection, recovery, monitoring and continuous improvement.

“It’s all those pieces,” she says.   

Swine Health Ontario has seven members from across the industry and is chaired by David Alves, Ontario’s deputy chief veterinarian. It’s working to develop high-level priorities and a work plan during the next few months.

The first meeting is in January where the group will discuss priorities, she says. After developing the priorities and work plan, “we’ll work with organizations that are already in place on project delivery,” Moser says.

There are several organizations in Ontario working hard to advance biosecurity and swine health in the industry, Moser says. Swine Health Ontario “is intended to bring those partners to the table so we can develop a coordinated plan together to deal with any emerging disease” along with ones already in Ontario, such as porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) virus.

The idea is to work more effectively together and “hopefully come up with a better outcome,” she notes.

The swine industry worked together to minimize the impact of the PED virus in Ontario and now it wants to build on that success to improve swine health for the future. BF