articles about Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea in Articles

What laboratory diagnostic methods can I use to diagnose PED? Which one should I choose according to the situation? How do I interpret the results?

Enric Marco comments on the practical implications of a recent research article about PEDv excretion in semen.

Dr. Robert Morrison created the Swine Health Monitoring Project in 2011 and, after his tragic loss, in May 2017 the program was renamed.

This article shows the different measures taken and the strategy followed to eradicate PEDv in a commercial farm: stabilization, creation of a disinfection bubble, monitoring and verification.

This article helps us to define the minimum biosecurity measures that should be internally established to prevent indirect PEDv transmission.

PED virus has challenged biosecurity programs in North America, the standards of sanitation have risen to a new level to address PEDV. The article deals with the most relevant changes.

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.

An accurate diagnosis is sometimes difficult because of the common occurrence of mixed infections, the compounding effects of environment and nutrition and the difficulties experienced in isolating and identifying all the possible pathogenic agents involved.

The transmission of PEDV through the feed supply chain is an example of a complex disease transmission pathway that triggered swine feed industry stakeholders to collaborate in understanding and addressing the risk factors.

All sequenced PEDV isolates that were found recently within European countries were most closely related to so called S INDEL PEDV, which was originally described in the US in January 2014.

How much has disease changed from its first introduction? Currently, we can find a new variant that appears to be a much milder form of PEDv, there are sow herds with chronic PEDv ( ~10% of breeding herds), a few sow herds with re-breaks (~ 3-5% of herds), ….

Recently, PED outbreaks caused by viruses with high sequence identity to those in US but with rather low impact have recently been reported in several European countries.

The author questions whether the US virus is more virulent than the strain CV777 isolated in Europe in 1977 or whether the disease is indeed more devastating now than it was in the seventies in Europe.

The current situation for PED is that of continual occurrence of moderate to severe outbreaks in many pig farms, across Asia, USA and elsewhere, on both naïve farms and those that have suffered previous episodes.

In May 2013 a sow farm in Indiana (USA) broke with PEDv. In mid March 2014, scour were observed in the onsite nursery and finisher. In the subsequent week, PEDv was diagnosed of the same strain (99.9 % homology) and the virus moved into the farrowing house.

The main aspect that cannot be forgotten is the complete approach necessary to evaluate all possibilities. In that sense, samples have to be collected and tested to all possible agents that might cause diarrhea.