January 17, 2008

Greeting ISAA Members, Breeders, and Friends

As many of you may, or may not, be aware the ISAA has initiated a project that will join our dogs with the Canine Health Foundation’s CHIC system. 

The Canine Health Information Center, also known as CHIC, is a centralized canine health database jointly sponsored by the AKC/Canine Health Foundation (AKC/CHF) and the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (OFA). It is an online repository for breed specific health data that is available for anyone to review. 

To provide a source of health information for owners, breeders, and scientists, that will assist in breeding healthy dogs.

The CHIC program offers benefits to breeders, buyers, parent clubs, and researchers.

• For breeders, CHIC provides a reliable source of information regarding dogs they may use in their breeding programs. In the future, breeders can begin to analyze the pedigrees of a proposed breeding for health strengths and weaknesses as well the traditional analysis of conformation, type, and performance strengths and weaknesses.
• For buyers, the CHIC program provides accurate information about the results of a breeder's health testing. For diseases that are limited to phenotypic evaluations, there are no guarantees. However, the probability that an animal will develop an inherited disease is reduced when its ancestry has been tested normal. Further, as more DNA tests become available and the results are entered into CHIC, the CHIC database will be able to establish whether progeny will be clear, carriers, or affected.
• For our parent club, the ISAA, while establishing our new health database on our own, CHIC provides the answer with no upfront investment required by the club. The CHIC infrastructure is supplied and maintained by the OFA. The data is maintained in a secure environment by trained staff. The services are not subject to the time, technology, and resource constraints that parent clubs might face on their own. This frees parent clubs to focus on their core strengths of identifying health concerns, educating their membership, and encouraging participation in the CHIC program.
• For researchers, CHIC provides confidential and accurate aggregate information on multiple generations of dogs. CHIC information will also be useful for epidemiological studies enhancing our knowledge of health issues affecting all breeds of dogs.
• For members interested in canine health issues, CHIC is a tool to monitor disease prevalence and measure progress. Our breed is a very healthy breed. Our goal is to keep it that way.

Your ISAA Board of Directors (BOD) has investigated the available options, and contacted the CHIC counsel, requesting that the Icelandic Sheepdog be included in the data base. We were added to that data base a few short days ago. We are very excited to share this new program with you hope you will participate.   

Your ISAA BOD wants health information to be accessible to everyone. Furthermore, we want that information to be housed in centralized locations. Currently, information for some health tests is online but not easy to find or navigate to.  Once breeders add information specific to their dogs, that information will all be in one place.  Most of the data present on the current OFA and CERF sites will be directly transferred to the CHIC site. A few tests, like PennHIP, that do not have an electronics transfer option, will require manual entry of the information and there will be a one time fee ($25), per dog, for this service.

There is one important task that can be completed by any person who owns an ISD that can help the breed in the future with research.  This is the submission of a blood sample for future DNA research specifically related to our breed. Blood is the gold standard for genetic material; the yield of DNA is sufficient for all research methods, including technologies on the horizon. Moreover, the stability and purity of the DNA is of the highest caliber, which offers many benefits. This is not to be confused with AKC DNA collection which is used for different reasons. 

The CHIC DNA Repository collects and stores canine DNA samples along with corresponding genealogic and phenotypic information to facilitate future research and testing aimed at reducing the incidence of inherited disease our dogs.

1. Facilitate more rapid research progress by expediting the sample collection process and allow researchers to begin testing immediately if we encounter a new inherited disease;
2. Provide researches with optimized family groups needed for research;
3. Allow breeders to take advantage of future DNA based disease tests as they come available;
4. Foster a team environment between breeders, owners and the research community improving the likelihood of genetic discovery.

You can request the “Application for DNA Repository” form from CHIC. The link is listed below. Have a 10cc sample drawn by your vet and shipped to the processing center.  There is a short survey to fill out and sent in as part of the process.  They also require a 3 generation pedigree which the ISAA (Knox Rhine) will provide, via email, if you do not already have one.  The cost of the blood sample processing is $20.00. Anyone who has recorded OFA and CERF results will receive a CHIC number upon submission of the blood sample.    

As part of our commitment to monitoring the health of our breed, the ISAA will reimburse the first 30 members half of the $20.00 sample processing fee once you receive your DNA registration number from CHIC.  Example: IS-DNA 1/B (the B means blood sample).  Furthermore, Breeders who participate in the CHIC program will get a “CHIC” label on the breeder page, attached to their breeder information on the ISAA website, letting people know that they are committed to the health of our breed. See example below.