This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. The previous editions of the science page are available on our website.
This week, we are proud to introduce a new chart in the Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. This new addition will be able to answer a common question regarding PEDV outbreaks:
Are the farms currently breaking with PEDV the same than the ones which broke in the past?
To interpret the figure, follows these steps.
- Horizontal axis represents all the farms that borke with PEDV during the season 2016/2017, with each tick representing an individual farm
- Vertical axis shows the previous seasons with 2016-2017 on top and 2012-2013 at the very bottom.
- The color of the cell (year : farm) represents the number of outbreaks experienced; darker blue meaning more outbreaks.
Here is the example of this chart presented this week:
Key points:
The farms that break with PEDV do not appear to have a history of PEDV infections in the prior season.
Of the farms that broke during the 2016/17 season, only 5 (6.5%) of them had outbreaks during the previous season and 43 (56.6%) of them had broken at some point since 2013.
Only one farm has had an outbreak every year since the beginning of the epidemic in the US (season 2013/14).