Wean to Harvest Biosecurity to be Developed to Help Contain Swine Disease Movement

A planned Wean to Harvest Biosecurity program offers to help contain the spread of swine disease causing pathogens.The Swine Health Information Center, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research and the National Pork Board have partnered to set parameters for a new Wean to Harvest Biosecurity program.

SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says it has become clear that infected finishing floors, whether that's with PRRS, PED or it could be with the next emerging disease, can serve as a nidus of infection for the breeding herd.

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

We're working on three areas in this.One is the transportation biosecurity.We don't have the infrastructure necessary to be able to clean, disinfect and dry every trailer that comes from packing plants or first points of concentration before they go back to the farm.

So, we're looking for cost effective and innovative ways that we may be able to disinfect trailers and help to prevent transfer of pathogens from those first points of concentration to finishing floors, grow-finish sites, nurseries, those types of things.

The second area that we're focussed on is this idea of nurseries, grow to finish or finishing sites themselves.
In biosecurity we have two pathways that we have to pay attention to.One is bioexclusion.

Keeping disease off of the farm is bioexclusion, excluding them from on the farm themselves.Also, we want to investigate biocontainment.

That's the idea that, if you break with a disease on a site, if you're able to contain that disease on the site and prevent it from spreading to other sites, that will help to contain the disease and work its way out.

Dr. Sundberg says the objective is to develop a call for proposals that can be sent out in October.