Pork Producers Advised to Take Advantage of CanSpot ASF ASF Rule Out Testing

The Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network is encouraging pork producers to take advantage of ASF rule out testing in the event of any incident of sudden death in their herds. The Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network's swine disease surveillance report for the first quarter of 2021 includes references to two or three cases of sudden death in sows, presumably linked to Clostridial infection.

CWSHIN Manager Dr. Jettte Christensen says these incidents are under investigation but they're a reminder that sudden death, no matter what the age of the pig, is eligible for ASF rule out testing.

Clip-Dr. Jettte Christensen-Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network:

We expect that, if ASF first enters a barn, it can be very subtle in the sense that there's only a few pigs at first that get infected and they will die but it will be masked by the normal morality in the barn. The normal diseases are there.

It's hard to distinguish in these very early stages whether it's ASF or something that you've been dealing with for a long time. What happens then is, after a couple of weeks, ASF will have spread in the barn and you would see massive mortality and lots of death. Once enough animals are infected most of them will die.

So, there's no chance you will have ASF in a barn forever without noticing it. What the issue is is that you really want to detect it as early as possible so you don't put your contacts at risk so you want to detect it when there's only a few animals in your barn infected. One of the tools that we have to help in that situation is the CanSpot ASF rule out testing.