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 the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project shares a general update and summary of where they are.
The 2021-2022 MSHMP incidence year again brought us unexpected events and chances to learn. We were able to meet these challenges because of the MSHMP participants that continue to share their data. We would like to provide a general update and summary of where we are at this point in time.
Disease incidence monitoring
PRRSv – The 2021-2022 PRRS season returned to the original trend by having one epidemic starting in November 2021 as expected. The cumulative incidence ended in 24.2% which is similar to what we have seen in most MSHMP years. Unfortunately, one third of the breeding herds in our project are in an unstable status indicating that an important number of positive pigs are populating the growing pig farms.
PEDv surprised us this year as we had the third highest cumulative incidence with 8.4% of the herds reporting an introduction. The highest and second highest cumulative incidence were in 2013-2014 with 40.3% and 2017-2018 with 8.5%. Most of the herds that had an outbreak this year had not had an outbreak in the previous years. As reported before, the outbreak began during the winter and it seems that it has now ended.
Prospective monitoring of PRRSv
As we continue to monitor PRRSv sequences, we have been able to aid in 17 outbreak investigations and queries by comparing sequences of interest to the MSHMP database and connecting participating systems when all the involved parties consent to remove anonymity. Additionally, we continue to monitor the occurrence in time and space of the newly emergent variant from late 2020 and have been providing support to PRRSv monitoring regionally.
To expand participation to allow all to be involved
Thanks to participant commitment and support we have been able to grow the MSHMP database both through growing pig site and boar stud data. We currently have growing pig sites from 13 participants. With regards to boar studs, we have accounted for 49 studs from 19 companies. A significant part of expanding these datasets is the background process of validating, organizing, and uploading the farm information provided. Additionally, as the number and diversity of farms has increased, we have continued to tailor our database and webtool interface structures to better manage the growing data. This process is particularly important for the large number of growing pig sites that are added in batches.
We would like to thank all the MSHMP participants and other collaborating organizations for helping us reach our 13th year of this project. Without your trust and feedback and SHIC’s financial support, this milestone would not have been reached.
Sincerely,
The MSHMP Team