Moderate Decrease in PRRS in December Suggests Promising Trend

The Swine Health Information Center suggests a moderate decrease in the detection PRRS in the wean-to-market category from November to December represents a turning point in the case positivity of PRRS. As part of its January eNewslettter the Swine Health Information Center has released its monthly domestic and global swine disease monitoring reports.

SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says one of the big changes in this month's domestic report was a moderate decrease in the PPRS case positivity in the wean to harvest sector.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:

This past year PRRS has been very active and the L 1C.5 strain has been about 50 percent of wild type diagnosis in 2024.With that high level of PRRS and high level of focus, people have really been trying to identify ways to reduce transmission and reduce spread and that can be through a variety of different steps, whether that's increasing sanitation of trucking, evaluation of manure hauling, even looking at strategic vaccination to try  to help stem the virus but a lot of focus has really been spent in this particular area just because of the large amount of infections that had been noted since 2024.

Other pathogens that are tracked such as PED, influenza, delta coronavirus and Mycoplasma, followed expected patterns but there were some signals on a state by state and regional basis for increased activity in these different pathogens. When they were looking at a case diagnosis, they still saw PRRS, Strep suis and Pasteurella multocida having alerts that there was more diagnosis occurring for those different pathogens.

Dr. Becton says it really is important to be able to look at evolving trends, comparing what is expected to what is actually happening, to evaluate when is there a potential emerging issue? The Swine Health Information Center's domestic and global swine disease monitoring reports can be accessed at swinehealth.org.