As the result of a lack of funding, swine disease surveillance activities provided through the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network have been suspended.

CSHIN manager Dr Chris Byra notes we've had several examples of how the system can be of value in providing an early warning of developing disease trends and, in the case of PED, the Data Network demonstrated its ability to substantiate that a disease was not present in Canada.

Dr Chris Byra-Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network:

Other countries seem to be modeling things after CSHIN.

The person with the original ideas here, Dr, John Berezowski, is in Europe now and four countries have gotten together to build a similar system under his guidance.

Australia has gone that route, the US has a large project in 15 states to do something similar so I think at this point we're ahead of the game or ahead of the world and the fact that people are copying what we're doing is probably an indication that we might be on the right track.

There are a number of anecdotal examples that make us realise this is a system that's capable of doing pretty much what we said it would in detecting emerging diseases and doing some analytical work with producer diseases that right now nobody is doing on a national basis and I think it should be supported.

I strongly encourage anyone who is concerned that it's shut down to contact the Canadian Pork Council or Agriculture Canada about continuation of this.

I'm fairly certain that funding for this down the road, assuming it does start up again, will come from multiple places not just producers.

There'll be multiple stakeholders.

Some have already come forward.

Dr Byra says the network has vastly improved the communication between vets and producers and is probably the least expensive emerging disease surveillance system available.