Keeping Our Healthy Breed Healthy

The ISAA Board of Directors is grateful to the following individuals for their generous donation of Icelandic Sheepdog (ISD) DNA samples to the Canine Health Information Center (CHIC) database. The data gathered can help the breed in the future when used for research. The club participates in this program proactively to insure that we do all we can to maintain the health of our beloved ISD and are positioned to act if a health issue were to arise.

This is one vital link to information that can be contributed to by any person who owns an ISD.  If you are interested in helping, please read the information posted below the list of our generous donors. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the Board of Directors at isaabod@gmail.com.

Thanks again to the following individuals and, of course, the ISDs for their generosity! We can’t do it without your help.

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 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. 

This is not just a program for breeders as all of the DNA in our gene pool is important, not just the breeding dogs’. If your dog is a member of your family and has been spayed/neutered, please consider participating. Your dog may hold the key that unlocks the door to better understanding how we can maintain the health of the ISD.

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 copy of the three generation pedigree which the ISAA has provided for you.  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 choose to participate in the CHIC program will get a “CHIC” label on the breeder page, attached to their litter information and posted on the new www.is-pedigrees.com website, letting people know that they are committed to the future health of our breed and have voluntarily gone the extra mile. This free advertising is our way of rewarding those who spend the time and money to help us See example below.

Note: If you should choose not to ask ISAA for the $10.00 reimbursement, we will be grateful and will consider it a donation that can be used for future projects.

Shellie Greyhavens

CHIC Representative

isaabod@gmail.com

Other tests will be reviewed in the future, after CHIC is fully implemented, for ISAA partial cost reimbursements to participating breeders and/or “pet” owners.

Thank you for your commitment to our wonderful dogs and a big thank you to Knox for all his hard work on this project.

Your ISAA BOD,

Donna, Spike, Liz, Shellie, Peg, Maggy, Judi

Updated 11.07.08