Long Term Control of PRRS Remains as Pork Sector Priority

The Swine Health Information Center reports, despite a slight decrease in PRRS infections over the past month, the number of cases continues to increase over the longer term. As part of its February enewsletter the Swine Health Information Center has released its monthly domestic and global swine disease surveillance reports. SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg observes, over the long term, PRRS has continued to increase.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:

Over the last month there's been a slight decrease in PRRS in wean to market sites, which is good news. We know that the wean to market sites are often the sources of different pathogens for breeding herds so anytime you can see something happening in the wean to market sites in those finishing floors with a decrease in viral load or disease load that's good news.

There has been though three consecutive years of increases in positive PRRS PCRs so PRRS virus continues to spread and I think long term that's one that the industry really has to work on and has to try to solve. Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, PED has also had some activity in January. The last part of December and in January there's been an uptick in that.

I don't know the reasons why but we can report that the diagnostic labs certainly are seeing it and reports from the field that I'm getting show that PED cases are somewhat on the rise too. You've got to take that in some context because this is February now.

Through January and into February is also the time that we traditionally have an increase in both respiratory and enteric pathogens because we have the facilities closed up and things are much tighter during the winter season than during the summer.