Mitigating viruses in pig feed ingredients.

Mitigating viruses in pig feed ingredients. Veterinary researchers in the US and Canada have become particularly interested in the role feed has to play in transmission of viruses.

 A team of leading experts dived into the question of how viruses might be shipped around the planet. It was in 2014 that the North American veterinary community – as well as the worldwide feed and pork industries – started to realise that viruses were being transmitted in feed. Porcine Epidemic Diarrhoea (PED) broke out in the United States in 2013 and, by January 2014, the disease had arrived in Canada.


 “We figured out quite quickly at that point that the outbreak here in Canada was linked to a certain feed ingredient, from the same feed mill, and soon thereafter a research paper was published by scientists at the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg Manitoba that showed the link was possible”, explains Dr Egan Brockhoff, veterinarian at Prairie Swine Health Services in Red Deer, AB, Canada and veterinary counsellor for the Canadian Pork Council. “

 African Swine Fever (ASF) came along and since then in the US, Dr Scott Dee, Dr Megan Niederwerder and Dr Cassandra Jones and others have done a lot of work to look into how viruses can tag along in feed ingredients being shipped all over the world.”

 Among the many other studies, Dr Dee (of Pipestone Applied Research at Pipestone Veterinary Services, MN, United States) and colleagues had published an evaluation in 2018 of the survival of livestock viruses in animal feed ingredients that were, and still are, imported daily into the US.

 The study involved simulated transboundary shipping conditions and 11 diseases of global significance: Foot-and-Mouth Disease, Classical Swine Fever, ASF, influenza A, pseudorabies (Aujeszky’s Disease), Nipah disease, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS), Swine Vesicular Disease, Vesicular Stomatitis, Porcine Circovirus 2 and Vesicular Exanthema of Swine.


 For six viruses, it was possible to use surrogates with similar genetic and physical properties, but for the others actual viruses had to be used “We found that more viruses survived in conventional soybean meal, lysine hydrochloride, choline chloride, vitamin D and pork sausage casings,” says Dr Dee. “These results also supported data already published on the risk of transporting PEDv in feed.”

Read research here.