Good day from ADDL. Again, fall is a wonderful time of the year. Changing colors, harvest time, chill in the air, shortened days and football. In their own ways, good things. At the ADDL some items of interest include: testing of animals at the Indiana State Fair this year revealed more animals positive for having received unauthorized drugs than at any time since we started testing. I believe that this should be publicized to the State Fair exhibitors as a deterrent to exhibitors in future years. An incident occurred with one of the champion animals in 2003, but there was not much publicity given to it. Perhaps more publicity would have been beneficial to abandonment of this practice by others this year.
Later this year we will be performing testing for Chronic Wasting Disease on samples from approximately 1000 hunter killed deer from the '04 hunting season. Up to now, we have tested over 4,000 deer and found no evidence of CWD among deer taken in Indiana.
We have recently received acceptance of an offer we extended to Dr. Roman Pogranichniy who will be joining our faculty as diagnostic virologist next year. The diagnostic virology position of the ADDL has been vacant for a few years and we are excited about having Dr. Pogranichniy join us to provide the valuable services of a most capable veterinary virologist to our diagnostic efforts.
A measure of the suitability, capability, operating procedures, and standards of our laboratory will be under examination in late November when our laboratory will be visited by a site visit team to evaluate us for re-accreditation of our laboratory by the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians. We are preparing for the visit and look forward to the feedback provided us by the accreditation process.
An old adage is that "the rewards for providing good diagnostic services are requests for more diagnostic services". This has been demonstrated by the requests received by our molecular diagnostics section for same day turn-around testing of swine semen samples for PRRS. The number of requests has risen to the point that it will be necessary for practitioners or swine owners to contact the molecular diagnostics section to reserve time for semen submissions 2-3 days ahead of time unless you are among the routine submitters for service on Mondays and Thursdays. At this time, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays have available slots for testing.(See page 6 of this newsletter.
I hope this finds each of you enjoying beautiful fall weather and glad we're not in Florida. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to those who have lost so much to the recent unstable weather there. |
Home
