Farmscape for February 27, 2025

A study conducted through the University of Minnesota's Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project is shedding new light on the evolution of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea in the United States.
The emergence of PED in the spring of 2013 and its rapid spread to multiple states causing high neonatal death loss, poor doing nursery and growing pigs, sick sows and decreased feed conversion sent shockwaves through the U.S. swine industry.
Swine Health Information Center Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says, a decade after its introduction, researchers with the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project looked at the long-term evolutionary dynamics of PED to help guide strategies for future control.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:
It was noted within the study that we did see genetic differentiation over time which makes sense because we're dealing with a virus.
Most of the sequences that were identified after 2017 were really segregated into two different subclades.
They also noted that circulation was restricted to specific geographic regions and that they thought may suggest some degree of compartmentalization or at least limited spread between sow farms in a relative region.
The value of assessing this is really to look forward and say, how can we understand the risk of spread and how can this help try to inform, if we go through an elimination project, and what are the risks of reintroduction if the regional elimination or even national elimination should be successful.
The value really is to continue to monitor over time the changes that are seen in PED.
A lot of it is to confirm, are the older clades that have been identified still in existence or are there newer ones, what's the distribution of the clades that are being identified and continuing to understand the genetic diversification over time because this can guide strategies on how producers view biosecurity, regional elimination and many other practices to reduce the impact of a disease.

This report and others can be accessed through SHIC's web site at swinehealth.org.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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