Farmscape for April 28, 2025

A University of Minnesota study shows water-based cleaning and disinfection of swine transport trailers is the most effective approach to reduce the risk of PED.
The University of Minnesota, with funding provided through the Swine Health Information Center Wean-to-Harvest Biosecurity Research Program, in partnership with the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and Pork Checkoff, has completed a study which evaluated cleaning protocols to mitigate the spread of porcine epidemic diarrhea.
SHIC Executive Director Dr. Megan Niederwerder explains researchers used a model to simulate the environment between a loadout and a contaminated trailer and compared an untreated positive control, an untreated negative control and three cleaning strategies, a dry scrape and bake followed by heat treatment, a volume hose flush out followed by disinfectant and a power wash followed by disinfectant.

Clip-Dr. Megan Niederwerder-University of Minnesota:
They were able to confirm that the simulated foot traffic between a trailer and a loadout area did indeed contaminate on farm, or their simulation of on farm from the PEDv infected feces.
The positive control has PEDv contamination in the on-farm location.
What they were also able to determine is that there were two cleaning strategies that really worked well to effectively reduce the level of contamination on farm as well as inactivate the virus.
Those two cleaning strategies included the volume hose and the power wash and disinfect.
Those strategies reduced the viral contamination by over 99 percent and were both really effective at complete inactivation of the virus.
On the other had what they found was the scrape and bake cleaning strategy did reduce the viral load by over 98 percent but it was not effective in inactivating the virus.
There was still viable virus found in the on-farm location and it was not effective at completely mitigating the risk of PEDv contamination of that livestock trailer on farm interface.

The full report can be found at swinehealth.org.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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