PRRS virus still causing trouble for US pork industry

The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center reports, controlling PRRS remains one of the US pork sector's most difficult challenges.
calendar icon 14 April 2020
clock icon 3 minute read

The Swine Health Information Center's April Domestic and Global Disease Monitoring Reports were released last week as part of its monthly newsletter.

Dr Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center, says we've seen a seasonal increase in the incidence of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRSv), which is not surprising given the weather conditions in March, coronaviruses including both PED and the swine delta coronaviruses are up slightly as expected and incidents of mycoplasma decreased in March compared to February.

"The increased incidence of PPRS is of concern," explains Dr Sundberg,

"Some of that is happening on sow farms with sow farms re-breaking. There's also an issue of different strains that may persist longer on farms and be harder to get rid of.

"We're going through that process of learning and re-learning again how to work with PRRS on the farm. But, as an overall 50 thousand foot health view, I think that for the most part, the health status of the herds in the US are pretty much as expected given their seasonal variations.

"One thing of note is that, in almost 3,500 cases of enteric disease that have been submitted to the diagnostic labs of Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota and Kansas, we only found one case of a positive TGE, Transmissible gastroenteritis. That's an extremely low level.

"We think that is affected by the other coronaviruses that circulate.

"It's interesting to note that, as we've had PED and the PDCoV that is circulating, it's almost taken TGE out of our farms."

Dr Sundberg notes the April 2020 disease monitoring reports can be accessed at swinehealth.org and he invites anyone interested to subscribe to the monthly newsletter.

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