piglet – Swine in Minnesota

Summary: Implementation of piglet castration under inhalation anaesthesia on farrowing farms

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.

Researchers at the Clinic for Swine at LMU Munich (Eva-Maria Winner, M. Beisl, S. Gumbert, H. Härtel, J. Kaiser, A. Wernecke, S. Senf, Y. Zablotski, M. Ritzmann, and S. Zöls) take a look at piglet castration under inhaled isoflurane.

Impact of nurse sows on influenza A virus transmission

A study by the Torremorell group was recently published in the Preventive Veterinary Medicine Journal. In this publication, Dr. Jorge Garrido-Mantilla et al. evaluated if piglets put together with a nurse sow were more likely to be influenza A positive and conversely, if a nurse sow could become infected when adopting a litter of positive piglets.

Understanding PRRSv diversity at the pig and litter level

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. Mariana Kikuti from the MSHMP team is sharing results from a study using whole genome sequencing to assess PRRSv diversity within and across litters.

Key points

Viral diversity within the piglet population is generally small, but higher diversity was found in ORFs 4 and 5a.
Within animal consensus changes were observed in a period as short as 2 weeks, which means piglets might be going to the GF sites with different viruses than the ones identified closer to farrowing.

How investigating the piglet helps us advance influenza control

Before we start with today’s post, we would like to wish you all the best for this new year. Thank you for your support and for reading us year after year.
So here is to a new decade, always bringing you science-driven solutions!
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Weaning-age piglets are responsible for the spread of many diseases, but in the case of influenza, they are also responsible for circulating the virus within the herd.

Effect of Single Dose of Antimicrobial Administration at Birth on Fecal Microbiota Development and Prevalence of Antimicrobial Resistance Genes in Piglets

It is the end of the year and to celebrate, here is one of the favorite Science Pages of the year, from Dr. Lowe’s team at the University of Illinois.

Keypoints

Early life antimicrobial prophylaxis had no effect on individual weight gain, or mortality but it was associated with minor shifts in the composition of fecal microbiota and noticeable changes in the abundance of selected Antimicrobial Resistant Genes
The shifts in fecal microbiota structure caused by perinatal antimicrobial intervention are modest and limited to particular groups of microbial taxa
Early life PPG and TUL intervention could promote the selection of Anrimicrobial Resistant Genes in herds