The Swine Health Information Center is requesting broad input from industry as it formulates the Plan of Work that will guide its activities during the coming year.

As part of its December e-Newsletter the Swine Health Information Center has issued an invitation to pork sector stakeholders to outline priorities and submit ideas for dealing with emerging swine health issues.

SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg notes the plan of work provides a framework of what producers consider important in addressing emerging issues.

The 2022 plan of work is on the swinehealth.org web site so people can see that as an example of what we’re looking for. We try to start with a blank slate every year but we look at things like improving information, like responding to disease, to emerging disease, things like ensuring there are diagnostics to discover emerging diseases.

There are broad headings that we try to work under. What we’re asking is for researchers, university researchers or other researchers, allied industries, pork producers especially, veterinarians and also state and federal animal health officials to give us input into the things that are on their minds about emerging diseases and their priorities for what needs to happen in the next 12 months.

We don’t do this plan of work as a five-year plan. We do it every year because we want to work urgently and nimbly to make sure that we get at the things that are affecting or are on the high priority list of the industry currently so we can make progress and help to strengthen the pork industry.

~ Dr. Paul Sundberg, Swine Health Information Center

Dr. Sundberg encourages anyone interested to access the Swine Health Information Center web site at swinehealth.org for direction. He says the goal is to have this put together within the next three to four weeks for presentation to the SHIC Board of Directors meeting in late January.