Testing saliva for human diseases has been around for as long as a century, but it was only about a decade ago that someone thought it might work for livestock as well.

The swine industry is getting very close to being able to detect the presence of disease in a herd using a rope that pigs can chew on and leave their saliva for testing and that was the topic of two presentations Friday at the Boehringer Ingelheim swine health seminar in North Carolina.

John Prickett with Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine has been studying oral fluid testing of swine for four years and he says the rope collection method works pretty well. “The pigs love it. They’re very inquisitive by nature, there’s not a lot for them to do and they are always looking for the ropes – they have fun with it,” he says.

They have data on testing for a variety of diseases and now the work is moving forward with assay development, which Dr. Jeff Zimmerman of Iowa State University says is the key to making oral fluid testing affordable. “Between 12 and 18 months from now, we are going to have antibody-based assays that are ready to go,” Zimmerman said. “And that’s going to be when we start getting the costs down.”

Zimmerman says disease control relies on good data and he says better data would have helped the industry get correct information about the H1N1 outbreak disseminated faster.

BIVI swine health seminar photo album

Listen to or download back-to-back interviews with John and Jeff here: