The National Pork Board is confident the development of better methods for controlling PRRS will help producers deal with other swine diseases.
Porcine Reproductive and respiratory Syndrome or PRRS causes reproductive losses and increased mortality.
To address the disease the U.S. based National Pork Board is coordinating a National PRRS Initiative.
Swine health and research director Lisa Becton told Canadian Swine Health Forum 2009 yesterday, because PRRS mutates easily it is particularly challenging.
We’re not exactly sure how this transmits between farms.
We know how it transmits between pigs but is completely aerosol transmission, is it through fomites versus trucks or semen?
There’s a lot of things that we don’t know how it transmits and then also we’re not exactly sure how it evades the body’s basic disease removal mechanisms so how it can fool and hide from the immune system.
Until we understand that creating a vaccine is going to be very very difficult to do.
Again, it really comes down to the transmission and the diagnosis, how can we have better tools to develop those things.
Right now we do have a fair amount of tools in our tool kit.
Really our diagnostic tests continue to improve on early and accurate detection of PRRS virus.
A lot of these tests can be designed to detect PRRS as early as 24 hours after infection.
I think we’re looking at different methodologies that we can utilize for easier sample collection like rope techniques or ear vein puncture.
The other things we’re looking at are the PRRS risk assessment model that can pull out what are biosecurity risks to farms that are looking at eradication programs also just improving and understanding better biosecurity.
How do you prevent dirty supplies coming in the farm or dirty trucks from entering the farm.
Becton says, because the biosecurity principles for PRRS apply to other diseases, strategies for addressing PRRS will reduce the risk of other infections.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
