The Associate Director of the Swine Health Information Center says the onset of warmer weather offers pork producers an opportunity to take steps to improve the biosecurity of their farms.
The Swine Health Information Center’s April domestic swine disease monitoring report identifies seasonal decreases in case positivity for PED, delta coronaviruses and mycoplasma, a seasonal decrease in PRRS case positivity, mostly in wean to finish with North Carolina and Iowa and reporting higher than expected increases in PRRS positive cases and, over the past four years, no positive identification of Transmissible gastroenteritis.
SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says the warmer weather is welcome.
Typically, a lot of pathogens that we deal with can survive for an extended period of time in cold wet weather and so the natural coming of spring and summer can bring about different things such as more UV light from sunlight and that can help dry areas as well as have natural kill of different pathogens. However, when we do look at spring, spring can be a volatile time of year, both in different weather swings and temperature as well as different humidity and even environmental conditions such as flooding.
Last year we saw a lot of rain in the Midwest which led to different challenges with mosquitos but even with flooding across the areas. Any time we look at seasonality, it is important to figure out what can we do to reduce the stress from environment on our animals and thus help reduce some of the diseases pressure on animals as well. But warmer weather means we can be more aggressive with sanitation of farms, even on outside areas for transportation, deadhaul environments and equipment being used so it’s important to get away from freezing temperatures and now focus on how can we improve cleanliness, reduce pathogen load and help to reduce some disease pressure on our production.
~ Dr. Lisa Becton, Swine Health Information Center
The Swine Health Information Center’s complete domestic and global swine disease monitoring reports can be found at swinehealth.org.
