News – Swine in Minnesota

Iowa State University student awarded 2023 Morrison Swine Innovator Prize

St. Paul, Minn.—Carly Bates, a third-year student at Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine, received the 2023 Morrison Swine Innovator Prize, an award given to veterinary students who want to specialize in swine medicine.

The award was presented on Sept. 18 at the annual Allen D. Leman Swine Conference hosted by the University of Minnesota (UMN) College of Veterinary Medicine. All North American veterinary students interested in swine health and production were eligible.

Bates was chosen for this award by a jury of three swine practitioners for her presentation, “How low should the pH go? How pH levels affect E. coli growth.”

CVM researchers awarded $800,000 USDA grant to create integrative data platform for major swine disease

A team of CVM researchers led by Kimberly VanderWaal (VPM) was recently awarded a 4-year, $800,000 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The study aims to create an “integrative data science” platform to predict the ability of PRRSV-2 variants to provoke an immune response and spread across farms. The platform will use interconnected machine learning tools from structural biology, computational immunology, and genomic epidemiology.

Measures of disease occurrence review

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 MSHMP weekly report contains the graphic representation of the occurrence and dynamics of specific swine pathogens using epidemiologic tools that measures of disease occurrence such as, prevalence, cumulative prevalence and incidence. In this science page we would like to reacquaint our audience with a few of these tools.

Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Viral Diversity within a Farrow-to-Wean Farm Cohort

Today we are sharing a recent publication from the MSHMP team in collaboration with the VanderWaal and Schroeder’s labs. The objective of the study was to assess the diversity of PRRS genomes within a cohort of naïve pigs undergoing a PRRS outbreak. The full paper is available online in open access.

Review of MSHMP PRRS Chart 2 ‐ Prevalence

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.

Key Points:

• Chart 2 depicts the prevalence (i.e., the proportion of breeding herds in each of the PRRS status categories over time).

• Since 2013, the proportion of farms that vaccinate (2vx) and that use field virus (2fvi) has not changed dramatically.

• The cyclical pattern of farms in status 1 observed early in the project is slowly disappearing after 2018.