The Veterinary Counsel with the Canadian Pork Council says excellent biosecurity remains the first and best line of defense for protecting swine herds from the threat of new higher pathogenic strains of PRRS.
Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, a viral infection that affects swine, readily mutates and, depending on the pathogenicity of the particular strain, can be extremely transmissible.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff, the Veterinary Counsel with the Canadian Pork Council, says PRRS has every ability to be transmissible and is spread through semen, respiratory droplets, milk, feces and urine and high pathogenic strains move very easily.
It’s interesting. We talk so much about disease prevention and when we talk about disease prevention we’re talking about biosecurity but it really is the core thing that keeps us protected. As we come through and continued to struggle with PED virus we’ve learned that, as good as we thought our biosecurity was, there’s always opportunities to improve.
There’s always little things that we’re missing. It’s those little details that have such huge stakes and this disease is very much like those diseases. It’s a disease that, with good biosecurity, great biosecurity, we can keep it out.
PRRS is definitely a complex virus. Eliminating it from a herd, if we completely close the herd, we load the barn with gilts, we’re looking at at least 200 days before we could have just that herd stabilized.
Those are very challenging things to achieve. The AASV, the American Association of Swine Vets has always advocated the goal that North America should move to be PRRS-free. I think we all still want to go there but this is a complex virus. It makes little mistakes into great opportunities.
~ Dr. Egan Brockhoff, Canadian Pork Council
Dr. Brockhoff encourages producers to be involved with the Swine Health Intelligence Network and ensure their veterinarians are working on the national surveillance system.
