New PCVAD Article Focuses on Disease Surveillance

Effective swine disease surveillance, control and prevention can be expensive but can contribute to an overall reduction in veterinary costs. While herd health profiling has traditionally involved blood sampling, it appears that sampling oral fluids can offer a simple, cost-effective alternative for the health profiling of large swine herds.

More details are included in a new article on Pork.org’s Porcine Circovirus Outreach/PCVAD site at http://www.pork.org/Producers/pcvad.aspx?id=517.

“The PCVAD Web articles are among the sites with the most visits, which indicates that people are looking for this type of information,” says Paul Sundberg, vice president of science and technology for the National Pork Board. “While PCVAD has been fairly well controlled by effective vaccines and good production practices, our goal is to help producers be as efficient as possible. When we have research results that can help lessen the need for input costs like animal health products and maintain or even improve production, we try to get that information out as quickly and as broadly as possible.”

Producers fund a great variety of research with their Checkoff dollars, including applied research to develop science-based information that can be put to use directly on the farm, Sundberg says. The Checkoff also supports basic research to answer academic questions upon which other researchers may be able to build additional knowledge and information. 

“The Checkoff-funded PCVAD research is an example of this combination. We’ve asked one of the country’s top PCVAD researchers to help interpret the technical results from PCVAD research and write this information in a more user-friendly format. The objective is to give producers access to science-based information that they can use on their farms to have healthier pigs and more efficient operations.”

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