Farmscape for January 10, 2018

Researchers working with Swine Innovation Porc are helping define where and what types of PRRS are present in various regions.
Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome affects all classes of pigs and results in substantial economic losses.
Dr. Sylvie D’Allaire, a Professor of Swine Medicine with University of Montreal, told those on hand yesterday in Banff for a swine health session hosted by Swine Innovation Porc, her research is focusing on understanding the epidemiology of the infection and identifying major risk factors and sources of infection to help control PRRS and assist in decision making.

Clip-Dr. Sylvie D’Allaire-University of Montreal:
The tool that we've been developing is how to get the sequences from the veterinarians.
We had a centralized database by which we could get the sequences and, for us, deciding whether there's a new introduction or not and not having to ask every month the veterinarians do we have a new case or something like that.
With that, there's a classification system that had to be developed to follow the epidemiology.
We had a total of 165 new introductions in breeding herds.
For each of these herds we followed all the herds that had the similar virus, for which we had a questionnaire on the compete biosecurity, on visitors, transport, all kinds of information and we're now analyzing it.
We also had the traceability pig movement from one farm to another, what went on off this farm and on the farm etcetera, all visitors also so that's why there's a huge amount of data here and we're just starting the analysis.

Dr. D’Allaire hopes to have the data analyzed by this summer.
For F armscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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