August 2025 – Swine in Minnesota

Featured abstracts of the Global African Swine Fever Research Alliance (GARA) Scientific Meeting – Part 1

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.

The Global African Swine Fever Research Alliance (GARA) aims to build worldwide research partnerships to tackle African Swine Fever (ASF). Their goals include identifying research opportunities, conducting diverse studies on ASF, assessing its societal and economic effects, developing new tools for prevention and control, evaluating their impact, and acting as a hub for communication and technology sharing in the global ASF research community. GARA fosters a coordinated effort leading to the progressive control and eradication of ASF. Their most recent scientific meetings, the 2025, took place in Rome, Italy, on April 2025. We have selected 2 abstracts from the proceedings book that we have included below.

Assessment of PEDV Trailer Contamination at the Harvest Facility

Today we bring you 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.

University of Minnesota researchers Lucas Ferreira, Mark Schwartz, Marie Culhane, and Cesar A. Corzo share preliminary results from their ongoing study examining trailer contamination at the harvest facility during unloading.

Scoring of swine lung images: a comparison between a computer vision system and human evaluators

Today, we are bringing you a paper recently published in Veterinary Research. This collaboration between the MycoLab at the University of Minnesota, Texas A&M, HIPRA Laboratories, and the University of Barcelona aimed at comparing scoring of cranioventral pulmonary consolidation by computer vision system and by a human evaluator.

Last chance for DVM Students to apply for the Morrison Swine Innovator Prize at this year’s Leman Swine Conference by tomorrow!

2024 MSIP Winner Savannah Thomson presents the Pig-O-Meter at the 2024 Leman Swine Conference

Veterinary students: Did you shadowing a swine practitioner this summer or have you been involved in an interesting clinical case investigation? Did you work on your veterinary skills by designing a differential diagnosis list or working on a treatment plan? Did you investigate a problem by analyzing production records? Share your work at the Allen D. Leman Swine Conference to win the Morrison Swine Innovator Prize!

Attending the Leman Conference is a great opportunity for veterinary students who want to network with industry leaders. Submissions to enter in the selection to present at the DVM student session at the Leman Conference should be uploaded at z.umn.edu/MSIP by the end of the day August 15th.

Best of Leman 2024: Annette O’Connor – Debunking environmental fallacies with a living systematic review

This is our most popular series on the blog. Once a month, we are sharing with you a presentation given at the Allen D. Leman swine conference, on topics that the swine group found interesting, innovative or that lead to great discussions.

You can find all of the presentations selected from previous conferences on the blog here.

This presentation was given by Annette O’Connor of Michigan State University during the 2024 Allen D. Leman Swine Conference, recorded September 23, 2024.