The Canadian Swine Health Board will host Canadian Swine Health Forum 2009, 7 and 8 July in Saskatoon.

The first of its kind conference will bring together stakeholders to discuss swine health matters including emerging disease research, biosecurity and best management practices and long term disease risk management strategies.

Canadian Swine Health Board acting executive director Morgan Radford says the forum will include a broad range of participants including producers, veterinarians, researchers, processors, government officials and others.

Morgan Radford-Canadian Swine Health Board

The hog industry really doesn't have an annual forum or an annual meeting where everybody can get together to discuss various issues and this is the first time that we're doing something like this specifically to deal with swine health matters.

In 2004-2005 we had an emerging swine disease that caused a lot of chaos in our industry and that was obviously circovirus.

We've recently experienced the H1N1 and it just shows how timely it is for us to get together and have a plan for how we deal with emerging diseases.

Right now there isn't a clear understanding of how things are supposed to happen and how are we as an industry going to deal with the next emerging disease because we're quite certain there's going to be another one.

During the actual forum we're going to have a brain storming session, we're going to provide participants with the opportunity to give feedback on paper and then after the forum for a few weeks we'll have a blog and comment feature on the site which will allow for further input from stakeholders.

For additional information on Canadian Swine Health Forum 2009 or to register visit www.swinehealth.ca.