AASV News (Mar 2015)

r perhaps the first time in the history of the association, the AASV Board of Directors will not conduct its usual spring meeting during the AASV Annual Meeting. Instead, the board voted to move the spring board meeting to a separate date and location in an effort to enhance the quality and quantity of time spent addressing AASV business. The AASV Committees will continue to meet at the annual meeting, allowing the committee leaders to submit motions and requests for action prior to the board meeting. In this break with tradition, the 2015 spring board meeting will take place Monday, March 30, in Perry, Iowa.

Emily Mahan-Riggs

Emily Mahan-Riggs selected Alternate Student Delegate to AASV Board of Directors

The AASV Student Recruitment Committee is pleased to announce the selection of Emily Mahan-Riggs (North Carolina State University [NCSU], 2017) as the incoming Alternate Student Delegate to the AASV Board of Directors.

Mahan-Riggs’ experience in swine medicine did not begin until the summer after her sophomore year of college. She was hired by Dr Randall Prather at the University of Missouri to work with caesarian-derived, colostrum-deprived transgenic and wild-type piglets that would be moved into the National Swine Resource and Research Center. She later created her own line of transgenic pigs to be used for human cardiovascular research. She also interned with Danbred North America (now DNA Genetics) to monitor the terminal traits of their maternal lines of pigs at one of their multiplier facilities. Prior to entering veterinary school, she worked with Dr Dick Hesse at Kansas State University.

Mahan-Riggs is active in the NCSU Student Chapter of the AASV and has sought out many opportunities to meet and shadow swine veterinarians while on breaks. She recently completed a cooperative internship between Prestage Farms and the NCSU College of Veterinary Medicine, troubleshooting seasonal infertility.

After graduating from veterinary school, her main goal as a swine veterinarian will be to effectively care for the health and well-being of all ages of pigs while helping her clients achieve and maintain profitable farms. She also plans to complete the Executive Veterinary Program in Swine Health Management, as well as become a Diplomate of the American Board of Veterinary Practitioners certified in Swine Health Management.

Mahan-Riggs will assume her duties as Alternate Student Delegate during the 2015 AASV Annual Meeting in Orlando. The current alternate delegate, Chris Sievers, will ascend to the delegate position. Chris and Emily will represent student interests within AASV as non-voting members of the board of directors and the Student Recruitment Committee.

Who moved my proceedings?

You won’t find the proceedings of the AASV 2015 Annual Meeting in your mailbox this year. Instead, the proceedings are as close as your fingertips and your computer or mobile device! Finding them is easy: go to https://www.aasv.org/annmtg/proceedings (or scan the QR code on this page) and follow the directions to download the proceedings in the format most suitable for you. You’ll want to make sure your AASV membership has been renewed for 2015, and you’ll need your AASV member username and password: if they’re not handy, contact the AASV office or use the “Reset Password” link in the upper right of the AASV Web site (https://www.aasv.org) to have them e-mailed to you.

The proceedings are available for download as a single PDF, just like the familiar “big book,” only in this case, the table of contents is linked to each paper contained in the book. Another option is to use one of our Web apps to download the full set of individual papers to your computer or mobile device. The apps utilize an interactive search feature similar to the one found on previous CD-ROM versions of the proceedings and allow you to access individual papers rather than the full book.

As in the past, all of the proceedings papers are also included in the Swine Information Library on the AASV Web site at https://www.aasv.org/library/swineinfo/. This fully-searchable, online library of nearly 12,000 proceedings papers and journal articles is just one of the many benefits enjoyed by AASV members.

So things really haven’t changed very much – they’ve just moved a little.

Operation Main Street training

Co-sponsored by AASV and the National Pork Board

AASV members like Drs Rick Tubbs, Craig Rowles, Amy Woods, Jeff Harker, Peggy Anne Hawkins, and Gene Nemechek – to name just a few of the 86 veterinarians participating in Operation Main Street (OMS) – are making a difference by sharing the facts about pig care and pork production with veterinary students, dieticians, and civic groups across the United States.

You can join your colleagues in the effort to counter misunderstanding and misinformation about the swine industry by becoming a trained OMS speaker. Operation Main Street speaker training will be held during World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, June 2 to 5, 2015.

In 2011, AASV and the National Pork Board partnered to train veterinarians as OMS speakers with a goal to schedule a speaker in all 28 schools of veterinary medicine. To date, trained veterinarians have presented at 26 of 28 schools, reaching more than 5000 students through this program.

The training updates participants on what activists are saying about agriculture today and provides attendees with the needed tools and presentations to address those concerns in a science-based, proactive manner. The objective is to equip veterinarians to speak to veterinary students and professional groups, including dieticians. Any AASV member interested in becoming a trained OMS speaker and helping in this endeavor is invited to participate.

For more information, contact Mary Wonders at the National Pork Board at Mwonders@pork.org or 515-223-3535.