You’ve been hearing quite a bit about foreign animal diseases impacting livestock—including bird flu, which is not only found in poultry, but now it’s been found in dairy cattle. State health officials are now letting folks know about voluntary programs for Indiana’s pork producers to help mitigate the risks of diseases that could spread among swine herds.
“Our ultimate goal is to prevent disease from ever reaching our swine populations and causing disease in our animals, so certainly prevention is key,” says Dr. Kelli Werling, Senior Director of Operations and Director of Swine Health with the Indiana State Board of Animal Health.
She says a new program that’s available is the U.S. Swine Health Improvement Plan.
“The full goal of that program is to minimize the effect of a trade-impacting disease—such as African Swine Fever (ASF)—in our pork populations here in the United States,” says Werling. “There are three essential pillars of the program: biosecurity, traceability, and disease surveillance. Those three main tenants of the program are what directs all the program standards and are the items that we ask for from individuals who are voluntarily choosing to participate.”
Another program is also seeking volunteers called the Certified Swine Health Collector Program.
“That program aims to increase the sampling capacity on these swine sites so that we could quickly and without delay be able to sample a large number of farms, if needed, to be able to determine if they were free from disease or if they were being you impacted or affected during that animal health emergency or incident,” says Werling.
With more volunteers to increase the sampling capacity, she also says it would greatly increase the ability for health officials to respond.
Dr. Werling adds that these two programs have an added benefit of building relationships between state health officials and Indiana’s pork producers.
“I don’t want the first time that I’m meeting a particular pork producer to be on their worst day—when their swine herds have been diagnosed with one of these trade-impacting diseases,” says Werling.
“Anything that we can do to work together ahead of time during what we call ‘peace time’ here at the Indiana State Board of Animal Health when there’s not an animal health emergency going on, is going to be invaluable where it ever to happen here in Indiana.”
Click HERE to learn more about the U.S. Swine Health Improvement Plan (SHIP).
Click HERE to learn more about the Certified Swine Sample Collector (CSSC) Training Program.
Click HERE to learn more about the National Secure Pork Supply Plan.
Click BELOW to hear C.J. Miller’s full interview with Dr. Kelli Werling, Director of Swine Health with the Indiana State Board of Animal Health, as she talks further about the programs available to safeguard Indiana’s pork industry by minimizing the long-term impact of a foreign animal disease.
