piglet – Swine in Minnesota

Can you estimate PRRSV piglet prevalence using family oral fluids? Yes, you can.

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.

Today’s Science Page brings together researchers from three continents! Onyekachukwu Osemeke, Eduardo Costa, Vinicius Weide, Swaminathan Jayaraman, Gustavo Silva, and Daniel Linhares share how to estimate PRRS prevalence at the piglet level in a farrowing room based on the results of family oral fluid testing.

Farm management practices associated with influenza contamination of people working in swine farms

We hope all our US readers had a great Memorial Day weekend. Today, we are talking about farm practices and flu in farm workers. This recent publication from the Torremorell lab is available in open access on the Porcine Health Management journal website.

Take-away points

Naïve piglets becoming infected with influenza before weaning participates in the endemic status of sow farms.
Numerous interactions between piglets and farm workers happen pre-weaning (e.g. processing, vaccinations)
Between 16% and 94% of the samples taken post-activity from farm workers’ hands and clothing were PCR positive for influenza.
Activities during the peri-weaning period had almost 6 times higher risk of flu detection.

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.