University of Saskatchewan Researchers Identify Bacterial Agent Responsible for Porcine Ear Necrosis

Researchers with the University of Saskatchewan have identified the bacterial agent responsible for porcine ear-tip necrosis, a painful infection that causes the ear of the pig to turn black rot away. Ear-tip necrosis, first identified in the 1950s, is found in all regions where pigs are raised.

With funding provided by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, researchers with the University of Saskatchewan conducted a blind clinical trial in which pigs where artificially inoculated with Fusobacterium necrophorum and compared with uninoculated sentinel pigs.Dr. Mateus Costa, an associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan's Western College of Veterinary Medicine and an adjunct professor at Utrecht University, says the goal was to determine the cause of the infection.

Quote-Dr. Mateus Costa-University of Saskatchewan:

We confirmed that ear necrosis is indeed an infectious disease and that Fusobacterium necrophorum alone is all we need to replicate the disease.This fundamentally changes the way we understand pig ear necrosis and breaks the dogma of about 50 years that ear necrosis is associated with mycotoxin or is associated with porcine circovirus or other agents.

Now we know that Fusobacterium necrophorum causes the disease so it will have a deep impact on how we handle it, how we manage it, how we control and treat it. The information is going to be used by any and everyone who is somehow linked to the pig industry, so researchers who have an interest in the disease and would like to further our understanding of the disease are now able to use this information to generate new models, investigate management methods to prevent disease or control the disease or even vaccine development.

Producers and veterinarians in the field can use this knowledge to do the same thing, attempt to mitigate the disease, attempt to control the disease during outbreaks but now they can apply proper tools to do that because they know who they are dealing with while before it was usually just a shot in the dark.

The work is chronicled as part of a peer reviewed open access PLOS One article that can be accessed by searching "reproduction of ear necrosis."
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