The Canada-West Swine Health Intelligence Network (CWSHIN) is a western Canadian swine disease surveillance system created to help swine veterinarians share information on clinical disease in swine herds in the four western provinces.

CWSHIN Manager Dr Jette Christensen says it has been recognised that data providers need value added to encourage them to keep recording and sharing their data:

"We want to build on that, specifically now when CWSHIN has been running for a number of years and we have already accumulated some data.

"That makes it more interesting to go in and use this data to see if we can get more value both for the swine practitioners who are recording all the clinical impressions and sharing the data with us, but also with the lab, and maybe we can combine these two better than we could in the past. With that we want to continue using existing data.

"There are other data sources out there for swine health and we might want to look into adding these data sources and putting the focus on analysing and creating value added for existing data rather than trying to make new data bases."

Dr Christensen says this will allow CWSHIN to build on its strengths and its foundation where is has a good base in the clinical impression data and its experience in sharing information on clinical diseases with practitioners and producers in the four western provinces.

As reported by Bruce Cochrane, Farmscape.ca