During a media dinner hosted by Boehringer Ingelheim (BIVI), during the 2014 World Pork Expo, attendees had the opportunity to learn a lot about what the industry is coining the 20th anniversary of PRRS (Porcine Reproductive & Respiratory Syndrome). The dinner kicked off with Reid Phillips, DVM PRRS technical brand manager for BIVI who gave the group a quick 20 year history of PRRS innovation. Some of these innovations were a result of the work of the Swine Health Monitoring Project.
Dane Goede is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota and during grad school, he began working on the then, fairly new, Swine Health Monitoring Project. Today, he has the opportunity to continue working on the project and gave an update on the 5 Years PRRS Incident Report.
The goal of the program, said Goede, is to monitor all the sticky diseases they are seeing in the swine industry right now including PRRS and PEDv. They take data from collaborative partners and try to get as much information as they can from sow production operations, and then they see if they can characterize what is happening with these viruses throughout the U.S.
For the past five years the team has been monitoring 14 production systems with a large amount of sows (372 herds and 1.2 million sows). Goede said they can now see a striking consistency in how the PRRS virus behaved. The virus seems to begin to increase during late fall and early winter and then kind of recovers in early spring.
“What is really interesting in the PRRS Incident Study is that this last year we’ve seen a really significant difference in both the timing of the incidences beginning to take off as well as the duration of the incidents we’ve seen,” said Goede. “This last year 2013/2014 something’s changed but we’re not really sure what that is. ”
Goede said there are a lot of factors including the introduction of PEDv, which could be taking the focus off of testing for PRRS. Aside from this, he said, we could just be getting better at what we are doing, and we’re all hoping that’s the case.
Producers who are interested in joining the Swine Health Monitoring Project can contact Dane Goede at the University of Minnesota to learn more.
Get the full 5-year PRRS Swine Health Monitoring Project Update in my interview with Dane: PRRS Incident Report
2014 World Pork Expo photo album
