We have talked several times over the past few years with Dr. Scott Dee of the Swine Disease Eradication Center at the University of Minnesota about area regional control (ARC) and elimination of Porcine Respiratory and Reproductive Syndrome (PRRS), since he is one of the early advocates of using that approach to the virus.
Scott was the moderator of last week’s Boehringer Ingelheim (BIVI) Area Regional Control Workshop in Chicago just prior to the start of the 2010 International PRRS Symposium – the third time they have held such an event which has gotten larger with every year. “It’s great to see new faces in the audience, but also a lot of the same people keep coming back and bringing new information,” Scott said. “We heard about projects that are happening throughout our continent, we’re hearing how people are doing it and it’s very similar.” The program featured updates from about a dozen ARCs in Canada and the US, as well as new tools that are being used.
The Minnesota PRRS ARC is one of the nation’s first, started in 2004. “For the longest time, we didn’t know where we were going, what we were doing. Then all of the sudden it turned the corner and before we knew it, the thing was basically PRRS-free in a very large geographical area of Minnesota,” Scott said.
Listen to my interview with Scott here here: Scott Dee