Diagnostics – Swine in Minnesota

Drs. McDowell and Sponheim discuss their paper on “Processing the Litter-ature”

The Swine Disease Eradication Center is proud to present another episode of “Processing the Litter-ature”: a podcast in which peer-reviewed papers are docked, clipped and supplemented with a field perspective.

In this episode, Drs. Emily McDowell and Amanda Sponheim discuss the paper “Pooled-sample testing for detection of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae during late experimental infection as a diagnostic tool for a herd eradication program.”

Listen to the podcast ~23 minutes

Influenza in swine: the latest updates – A podcast episode

Despite the many advances throughout the years, influenza still cannot be fully controlled and represents a major economic threat to the swine industry. Therefore, we can never discuss it enough and it’s never too late to tackle this challenge. In this podcast host Laura Greiner and guests Dr. Jeremy Pittman and Dr. Marie Culhane have a roundtable conversation about the latest updates about influenza, diagnostics and surveillance, and key strategies to manage those.

PCR detection of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae in piglet processing fluids in the event of a clinical respiratory disease outbreak

Dr. Vilalta and collaborators from the University of Minnesota provide new insights for the potential use that processing fluid (PF) may have to detect M. hyopneumoniae in breeding farms by bringing us a clinical case published in VetRecord Case Reports.

Highlights

Genetic material of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae from PF was quantified by real-time PCR.
The origin of M. hyopneumoniae genetic material detected in PF needs to be clarified.
Processing fluids are a potential sample to detect M. hyopneumoniae in breeding herds.

Use of sequencing technologies to improve swine infectious disease management

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, Shaoyuan Tan, PhD-candidate from the Murtaugh’s lab is sharing the technology behind MinION.

Key points

MinION sequencing can be used for antibiotic resistance prediction to guide prudent and effective antibiotic use
MinION sequencing can improve clinical diagnosis to strain-level detection
MinION sequencing is a potential solution for rapid emerging infectious disease investigations

What are the best diagnostic tools for tracking Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae in swine?

M. hyopneumoniae causes one of the swine industry’s most devastating diseases—a chronic, infectious pneumonia that can cause respiratory distress and lung lesions in pigs. It can also severely slow pig growth. In order for producers and veterinarians to best measure the success of their disease control and elimination efforts, they need to be able to detect the pathogen in live pigs. However, many diagnostic tools can be unreliable. Dr. Maria Pieters’ lab at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine recently led a study to decipher the reliability of two tools, laryngeal swabs and deep tracheal catheters, in detecting the pathogen.