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 sharing a survey from the MSHMP team on the different protocols used to classify PRRS status.
Key points
- The majority of veterinarians consider it important to classify sow herd PRRS status.Our survey showed that 8/21 follow AASV guidelines, with the others using alternative criteria.
- Half of the surveyed veterinarians use processing fluids as part of their testing protocol for determining sow herd PRRS status.
- Most of the respondents mentioned that AASV PRRS classification guidelines should be re-visited.
Twenty-one veterinarians from 12 participant systems and 1 non-participant group completed the questionnaire accounting approximately for 1.5 million sows.
When asked how important it was to classify sow farm PRRS status, 12/21 (57%) answered very important, 8/21 (38%) answered important. Among the most important reasons requiring PRRS status were:
- Commingling of pigs downstream,
- Timing the Depopulation/Re-population of growing sites with continuous flow, and
- Defining gilt acclimation and introduction procedures.
The testing protocol to classify a farm as stable varied across and within systems. However, the most frequent sample collected was due-to-wean blood sampling. Other samples are shown in the figure below.
