Diagnosis of enteric diseases in pigs( 2).

The ban on the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in farm animals has led to development of faster diagnostic techniques to facilitate proper treatment.One of such is the sock analysis;This has led to the development of what is generally known as ‘the sock method’ which consists of taking a standard sock, walking around all pens in the section to be tested, and the sock is then tested with the quantitative PCR test. The number of bacteria can be used to assess the financial impact and whether there are health-related conditions present in the animals tested. The study show considers whether sock samples and laboratory diagnostics could be used routinely as a decision tool for determining when treatment should be started in the individual batch or a pen-site test where farmers will be able to assess the level of pathogens on a daily basis – even in batches without any clinical signs of disease. A complication here is that many of the pigs which might not have clinical diarrhoea still can have a severe intestinal infection. This appears in cases of Lawsonia but also E. coli or Brachyspira species. There will therefore always be a number of pigs which, although not showing signs of diarrhoea, still need antibiotic treatment as it must be assumed that they, first of all, have reduced productivity but also reduced welfare. Several studies have tried to determine if welfare has been compromised in such pigs and there are some indications that this is the case. The best productivity and welfare are achieved by treating at batch level, this is supported by strong professional, scientific arguments for the fact that using batch medication in the water is actually the right thing to do. It has been examined that medication at pen level would be more correct, but as it turns out - all the infections are actually present at the same time in all the pens within the same room. Therefore, all pens within the same batch need treatment at the same time and nothing would be gained by medicating at pen level. Batch medication at section level is therefore the method that provides the best result. This has also been confirmed in another research project which looked at various treatment strategies and dosages. This again showed that herd medication for five days gives the best production result. Source; papers from pig progress.