Farmscape for January 23, 2017

Research underway at South Dakota State University shows imported feed ingredients are capable harboring the pathogens that cause disease in swine.
Pipestone Applied Research. the Swine Health Information Center and South Dakota State University have created a simulation to determine whether the pathogens responsible for swine diseases can survive the journey from China to North America in various feed ingredients.
Dr. Scott Dee. the Director of Research with Pipestone Applied Research, a part of Pipestone Veterinary Services, told those on hand for the 2017 Banff Pork Seminar the project is evaluating the survivability of 10 pathogens.

Clip-Dr. Scott Dee-Pipestone Applied Research:
We've developed a model to simulate the movement of feed ingredients from China to the United States starting in Beijing, going to Shanghais, across the ocean to San Francisco and then to Des Moines.
We're taking feed ingredients, we're purposely inoculating virus, we're storing them in an environmental chamber at South Dakota State.
Each day of our simulated journey, which is 37 days in length, we've got changing temperature and changing relative humidity conditions just like you would see on land or over water and then the samples are tested looking for whether the viruses survived or not.
We got original work being done, that we've published looking at Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus, and that was our first attempt to see if that's potentially how the virus got into the United States.
It lived in several ingredients, soybean meal, lysine, choline, vitamin D but not others and so there are differences in certain ingredients to support virus or not.
Since that point we've tried to look at whether foreign animal diseases could follow the same journey.
We've been using what we call surrogate viruses which are viruses which are similar in structure, and so we're putting those viruses through the model to see whether they can potentially survive.

Dr. Dee says the work demonstrates certain feed ingredients can harbor  pathogens.
Full results are expected mid-way through 2017.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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