When developing health programs for a race, there are several important factors that come into play. First and foremost, health programs for cooperation between breeders to keep the breed healthy and sound. The programs start when you discover a problem that exists within the breed and are detrimental to the cat.
You have to gather information and learn about the disease / defect, and find reliable test tools before starting a health program. Similarly, one must have a secure identity on the cats tested to avoid cheating and suspicion of cheating.
Recording of test results that are publicly available is another important part of health programs, mainly to save time and effort for farmers and for all breeders to have access to information, but also that through public, accurate information reduces the gossip and rumors. Of course, both good and bad results are published in order to be able to work on and evaluate the risks and opportunities for both cats themselves as their relatives. You also need to have both good and bad results available to calculate the frequency of the disease among cats.
This is needed to see if the health program eventually had the desired effect and to know how hard you can select breeding stock. By selecting too hard, you can instead get too small gene pool and thus stand in front of others even more difficult problems. One must also be able to get the same assessment regardless of the vet you go to, or which lab to send to. If you want to test against HCM, there is the Skogkattslingans website a list of registered veterinary surgeons / cardiologists performing the tests and collaborate, as well as contact information for the various labs that perform GSD IV tests.
An extremely important part of cooperation around a health program is to support and help each other. Anyone can suffer from diseases in their cats and we are all more helped by the support and caring than the bullshit and gossip. All breeders happen some time out for a more or less severe disease or defect in her cattery.
No one is spared or immune, but the important thing is how we act when we suffer and what we do together to reduce the risk. The prerequisite to this is that you know that someone has been affected and that are working together to reduce the number of sick cats for breeding. Often there is a risk of hysteria, and hence becomes too drastic in setting rules and recommendations.
In return, you then have fewer connecting to health programs and a smaller gene pool to work with. The recommendations for health programs should be evaluated periodically and may be adjusted as you learn new about the disease / defect.
In all breeding work is about reflection and analysis of potential problems, and to acquire knowledge about the problem. Be sure the breeder to keep accurate statistics of both positive and negative events. If the worst should happen and your cat would die, be sure to dissect the cat and get the correct diagnosis to gain more knowledge, and please share with you the results and lessons for breeding Council and other breeders. Last but not least, talk to each other and seek cooperation. It is our race together and we're all keen to keep it remained fit and healthy?
We also recommend the publication of all test results Pawpeds.
Pawpeds is a public database that publishes cats pedigrees and test results for various health programs. On some referrals is an approval that a copy is sent to the registrar of Pawpeds for publication and for others it can be self-sign a consent for the publication of the database, this is the Skogkattslingans website for download.
At the earliest 60 days after it has received the test results are published on the Pawpeds, which also communicates breeding Council test results. The reason that it takes 60 days to be the owner of the cat should be able to inform stakeholders and also have the time and opportunity to digest the possible positive test result.