Articles - Pig health

The economic potential lost in a unit positive to PRRS could be around 35 – 37% of net unit margin.

The recent development of PCR serotyping is a step forward that allows any laboratory to determine the serotype of the isolated H. parasuis strain.

Assessment of a study, by Enric de Marco, on the use of anti-inflammatory drugs in sows at farrowing in order to reduce piglet mortality and increase the weight of piglets at weaning.

Diarrhoea is their most typical clinical manifestation, and the earlier the onset, the more harmful it is. Newborn piglets can present with another clinical picture, with signs of sepsis (shock, depression, death, polyarthritis), which is associated with an extraintestinal E. coli.

In the United States, there are 17 genetic clades that have emerged and persisted following spillover events from non-swine (namely human) hosts and subsequent ecological and evolutionary processes

Management factors and environmental conditions are often triggers or predisposing agents, not only to the clinical presentation of the disease, but also its severity and course.

We are talking about PRRSV, M. hyo, PCV2, App and swine influenza virus.

The article provides an alternative to the current vaccination programs that could be the solution for farms with early onset oedema disease. However, this alternative —consisting of vaccinating the dams at the end of gestation to achieve post-weaning piglets immunization—, also raises questions...

Needle-free injection technology improves the dispersion of vaccines throughout the tissue.

Genetic selection provides a powerful tool to improve and maintain gut health in industrial pig production, and may in the future become a more sustainable alternative to the currently massive need for antibiotics.

Presumed causes of ear necrosis are many and generally speculative; indeed, there are many risk factors associated with ear necrosis including trauma from pen mates or the environment, overcrowding, commingling, high humidity, limited feeder or water space, misformulated rations, mycotoxins, viral diseases, or bacteria.

At autopsy, haemorrhagic enterocolitis with mucosal oedema, enlarged spleen and haemorrhagic mesentery were observed.

Without the participation in the program of all farms present in the area, progress will be minimal or nil.

Single animal treatment or batch medication? in any case, the treatment and choice of medication should be done based on resistance testing.

It has not proved possible to actively eliminate App from chronically affected permanently occupied breeder-feeder herds.

NFID administered swine vaccines can use half to a tenth of the dose required for intramuscular vaccines because of the higher antigen dispersion and contact with the antigen presenting cells found in skin.

All available vaccines in the European and North-American market are based on PCV2a genotype, while the most prevalent ones are PCV2b and PCV2d ones. Although significant level of cross-protection among these three genotypes has been demonstrated, it would be interesting to assess if vaccine efficiency would be equivalent in front of all these different genotypes.

This paper describes the acute outbreak of App within a pig population and how control may be achieved.

Inactivated vaccines can be effective if used in conjunction with other practices, such as controlled movement of animals and people and with careful analysis of whether the vaccine antigen is a good antigenic match with the circulating strain.

The isolation and acclimation period is not negotiable, it is an investment.

Virulence and infectivity differences between strains are notorious. Moreover, the new virus is not controlled with vaccines developed from classical strains and may yield false positives in some diagnostic tests.

A method to quantify the relative economic importance of pig health status at placement by specific pathogens (PRRSv and PEDv) and to estimate the effect of a specific type of PRRSv at a specific production system is presented.

Gilts are the population most likely to excrete M. hyo during lactation because they will probably have become infected within 200 days prior to their first farrowing.

Enric Marco sums up the essential points to control post-weaning diarrhoea in our farm.