"First, I want to say, we're very happy with the service we get at the university labs. We have a tremendous respect for the diagnostic pathologist and all of the work that they do," said Bill Hollis, practicing veterinarian with Carthage Veterinary Service in Carthage. "We also appreciate that they have been outstanding at helping us understand the presence of disease and solving issues on the farm."

Carthage Veterinary Service has established a routine weekly service of collecting diagnostics where they expect the results to be either positive or negative. The diagnostic tests are consistently performed in similar populations to gain an understanding of what's occurring within each herd.

"Being able to do that close to home without the shipping and packaging and also being able to accelerate some of the timing of results has allowed us to make decisions a little bit closer to the timing of what are we going to do with these results," said Dr. Hollis.

Monitoring for disease is always a challenge, and it's evolving over time, he said.

"But the real black and white comes in when we anticipate negative results, we know that we have a negative population, and we want the fastest and earliest confirmation if there's been a change," he said. "The same thing could be said for the population where we've established immunity. We have an ongoing herd health plan with vaccination and timing of animal movements. When there's a change and that population is either sick and we've seen this change, or we're introducing new animals and we know there's going to be a change in that population, it's good to have an action plan either way."

Having diagnostic tools that allow their veterinarians to being able to respond quickly and having a good decision tree in place to act on diagnostic results are helping the practice be more effective, Dr. Hollis concluded.

For more information about swine diagnostics, click here or connect to the Thermo Fisher Scientific Swine Resource Center.