Epidemiology – Page 8 – Swine in Minnesota

Temporal stability of swine movement networks in the U.S.

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, Dr. Dennis Makau from the VanderWaal lab is sharing a project on the importance of swine movement to identify farms with a high risk of disease outbreak.

Key Points

Animal movement is a key factor in the U.S. swine industry and is an important risk factor for disease transmission
Animal movement data combined with social network analysis can inform risk-based surveillance and control
Using production system movement data, it was possible to identify the time window of data needed to gauge connectivity and identify high-risk and high-spread farms
Using previous data up to two years old is still better than choosing randomly implemented interventions to manage disease spread, especially in cases of outbreaks transmitted via animal movements

Assessing Senecavirus A shedding and transmission in growing pig populations

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, Drs. Preis and Corzo are inviting you to participate in an AASV-funded project regarding the epidemiology of Senecavirus A in growing pigs.

Are mosquitoes a risk for ASF?

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 MSHMP tip summarized a publication by Qin et al. regarding the risk of mosquitoes carrying and transmitting African Swine Fever virus.

Key Points

African swine fever (ASF) continues to pose a large risk in the absence of safe and effective ASF vaccines
There is evidence indicating that mosquitos may be a possible ASF vector
Mosquitos captured at ASF positive farms had DNA extracted and tested for ASF with no positive results

Temporal stability of swine movement networks in the U.S.

Efficient and highly effective control of infectious diseases can be achieved by targeting interventions towards farms that are highly connected “super-spreaders” in animal movement networks. However, from an implementation standpoint, it is unclear how much movement data is required to gain an accurate picture of farm connectivity, nor how quickly movement networks change over time. For example, can movement data from last year be used to identify potential super-spreaders this year? How often do such analyses need to be updated? Answering these questions is key to moving from science to practice in terms of successful deployment of network-based targeted control strategies in swine production systems. In this study, Dr Dennis Makau and the VanderWaal lab aim to answer these questions for production systems in the United States.

Modeling the transmission and vaccination strategy for PRRS virus

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 Science Page is written by Dr. Galvis et al. from the Machado lab at North Carolina State University. They report their results with modeling PRRSv transmission in situations where vaccines can be used as mitigation tools.