Farm-Scape, Episode 2104

The Western College of Veterinary Medicine is encouraging swine producers to focus on good management as the best line of defense against Post-weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome.

Post-weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome is a viral disease which affects baby pigs, typically just as they enter the nursery phase or the early grower phase, and it's often fatal.

Four companies have vaccines in the pipeline for use in Canada.

Two have been granted emergency approval and one has inventory available.

Western College of Veterinary Medicine Associate Professor Dr. John Harding notes PMWS has spread worldwide since its discovery just over a decade ago.

"This is an emerging viral disease.

It was discovered in western Canada in 1995, has spread throughout the world since then.

Most European countries, Asian countries in the decade since.

It's come back to Canada and is affecting Ontario and Quebec at this point in time and causing some fairly severe mortality in some of the affected farms.

The cause of this disease has been extensively debated over the last decade.

What we do know is that a new virus called circovirus is required to cause the disease but there are other factors that are also required as well and they work synergistically and we call them triggering factors.

Ones that we certainly know of are other infections and those would be probably the biggest ones affecting us today.

So other infections like PRRS virus, swine influenza virus, parvovirus have been shown experimentally and in the field as being triggering factors."

Dr. Harding says vaccine is what we're all holding onto as being the silver bullet but time will tell.

Meanwhile, he suggests, the only option for minimizing the risk is to maintain good biosecurity and try to control all of the other diseases so common sense production practices, good sanitation, good all in all out management and things like that.

For more information, visit our PMWS Technical Zone

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.