New Swine Health Information Center Initiative to Focus on Finishing Phase Biosecurity

A new Swine Health Information Center initiative will focus on improving biosecurity and biocontainment within the finishing phase of swine production.

The Board of Directors of the Swine Health Information Center has allocated one million dollars to fund a new program on finishing phase biosecurity, a phase of production in which biosecurity gaps have been found to increase disease pressure on the breeding and farrowing phases.

SHIC Associate Director Dr. Megan Niederwerder explains research has shown, during the last several months of production, gaps in the cleaning, disinfection and decontamination of transport vehicles prior to returning to farms after delivering market hogs to slaughter are likely contributing to the spread of disease.

Clip-Dr. Megan Niederwerder-Swine Health Information Center:

We need to think of new and creative ways in which we can implement biosecurity protocols consistently on the finishing phase.The reason that we've really prioritised that is that we're seeing at the sow and breeding farm levels really great biosecurity protocols.

We know that neonatal piglets are more susceptible to certain diseases such as PEDv and PRRS virus and so what we're seeing is that those biosecurity protocols at the sow farms are effective and indeed many of the pigs postweaning are placed into the nursery and the grow finish as negative for PEDv and PRRS.Then, in these later tages of production, they are picking up these viruses, they are replicating these viruses, the diseases are impacting production efficiency at those phases and so we want to translate what we're doing at the sow level into all phases of production to really protect our entire industry against some of these diseases.

Dr. Niederwerder says the new program will concentrate on creating cost-effective new technologies and research into biocontainment, bioexclusion and transport biosecurity.