Farmscape for October 28, 2021
| Full Interview 6:50 | Listen |
The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center says, with no vaccines or treatments, preventive management is the best option for dealing with Atypical Porcine Pestivirus. Atypical Porcine Pestivirus has been identified in the U.S. since 2015 and it’s been in other parts of the world longer than that. The Swine Health Information Center has updated its APP fact sheet and identified a need for more research. SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg explains this is a virus that’s passed from the sow to her offspring, and can infect the nervous systems of any age pig but especially those early born pigs.
Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
It’s passed from the sows to the little pigs and anybody that is familiar with pork production has probably seen tremors, what is commonly called shaker pigs. In that case a pig is shaking, and sometimes very violently. Sometimes, so much that it has difficulty nursing and, if it has difficulty nursing then it can’t get nutrition and that is ultimately the demise of the pig. There are no vaccines.
There are no treatments. What it amounts to is we’re looking at ways to try to manage that. That can include things like testing for APP virus in semen for artificial insemination, exposing gilts to the virus through these congenital pigs to acclimate them to the virus before they’re bred, those types of things with feedback from clinical cases. Because there is no commercial vaccine that’s available, it turns into a management issue to do the best we can to prevent this condition caused by this virus in these early born pigs.
Dr. Sundberg notes the Atypical Porcine Pestivirus fact sheet is part of a library of fact sheets available at swinehealth.org.
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