PRRS – Swine in Minnesota

Impact of the Recombinant PRRSv Horsens Strain on the Reproductive Performance of Pregnant Sows

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.

In this article published by Zoetis in collaboration with the University of Denmark and Copenhagen, the authors discuss that there are currently at least 18 commercially licensed modified live vaccines (MLVs) for the control of PRRS in the global market and because these vaccines are live viruses, precautions need to be followed in order to maintain their safety.

Survival of swine pathogens in compost formed from preprocessed carcasses

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 summary of a study published by Dr. Brent Pepin et al. from Pipestone Veterinary Services on the survival of swine pathogens in compost.

Key Points

Composting of preprocessed carcasses effectively eliminated infective PRRSV/PED under cold weather conditions
Compost biomass type (carbon source) may affect the short-term virus survival
Environmental viral contamination (aerosolization and groundwater) from carcass preprocessing and windrow composting appears minimal under the conditions of the study
Compost reached temperatures that can adequately deactivate ASF

Production losses from a recombinant PRRSv outbreak

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 bringing to you a summary from a publication by the SEGES Danish Pig Research Centre and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The study published in Porcine Health Management describes production losses associated with a recombinant PRRS strain in breeding herds.

Key Points

A new PRRS-1 recombinant between two vaccine strains variant was reported.
This variant was detected in a boar station and affected breeding and production herds.
Production losses associated with this variant in the production herds comprised a decrease in liveborns/litter and in weaned/litter, as well as an increase in stillborn/litter which was higher than observed in previous Danish PRRS outbreak reports.

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.

Dr. Igor Paploski in the top 10 UMN Research Day infographics

Dr. Igor Paploski, postdoctoral associate from the VanderWaal lab ranked in the top 10 infographics at the University of Minnesota Research Day for his latest research on transmission of swine infectious diseases.