The Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network, developed on behalf of the Canadian Swine Health Board, is a national communications network that connects Canadian swine veterinarians allowing them to share information on disease issues developing in their regions.

The network was launched to help address gaps in national surveillance within the Canadian hog industry and to help improve communications.

Dr Chris Byra, with Greenbelt Swine Veterinary Services, one of the companies involved in developing the network, says about half of Canada's swine veterinarians have participated.

Dr Chris Byra-Greenbelt Swine Veterinary Services

On 14 January we're going to have a fairly large workshop. There'll be 50 attending in Calgary and that workshop will be to test drive the system.

It'll be a simulation of three disease problems occurring in different regions in Canada.

We've brought in individuals from each stakeholder group, so government, producers, veterinarians, laboratories and so on and we will run these scenarios.

People won't know what they're going to be.

They're going to run these scenarios and they'll include things that might have a trade impact, that might have a public health impact and we're going to test not only the functioning of the mechanical parts of the system but also of the decision making and the governance.

There'll be a number of people there as observers to help us come up with improvements where we need to do that.

Dr Byra says, from then on, it'll be a matter of fine tuning the program, bringing the people on stream who are providing data and then continuing with the social network meetings, the next of which is scheduled for late January.

For more information on the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network visit swinehealth.ca.