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.
Another MSHMP year has gone by and certainly will be one to remember due to the public health emergency leading to a crisis in our industry. Today, Dr. Cesar A Corzo provides comprehensive 2019/2020 concluding remarks and project updates. Thank you to all MSHMP participants for continuing to communicate and report status changes!
Objective 1 – Disease incidence and monitoring
- PRRSv – The 2019/2020 incidence year followed a very similar trend as the previous year with 23% (21% in 2018/2019). The duration and magnitude of the epidemic was quite similar when compared to the 2018/2019 year.
- PEDv – As with PRRSv, PEDv followed the same trend as the previous year since the incidence stayed below 5%. Most of these herds hadn’t seen PEDv activity for either one, two or three years.
- PDCoV – With low incidence, this virus continues to remain in the industry. Throughout 2019/2020 a total of 50 breaks were reported. This virus has been officially incorporated into our SQL database.
- SVV – Senecavirus A certainly behaved differently as during the end of the 2019 summer there was higher viral activity compared to the previous year. A second wave of cases were seen in the early stages of 2020.
- Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae – As part of our growth, we are currently in the process of adding the status for this bacterium to our database. We will continue to report on this initiative.
Objective 2 – Prospective monitoring of PRRSv
We have established a mechanism for PRRSv sequence acquisition with the 3 main veterinary diagnostic laboratories. We continue to help MSHMP participants with their outbreak investigations by comparing their outbreak sequence to our library and providing highest virus similarity and distance to such sequence.
Objective 3 – Develop capacity to capture and analyze movement data
Transport data has been generated without any concerns from a reliability standpoint. Networks have been built using the data validating our thought process. Further analysis is in the way as we have had MSHMP team turnover delaying data analysis.
Objective 4 – To expand participation to allow all to be involved
Expansion continues at different levels. During 2019/2020 we welcomed one more system to our project. In addition, we have already begun to add growing pig sites from different systems in order for us to learn how to manage and explore ways to link sow and growing pig farms. These are exciting times as linking farms is an interesting challenge.
“We will continue our mission of building a platform for foreign disease preparedness thanks to your support”
Dr. Corzo