Farmscape for January 9, 2015

Researchers working on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc are developing new methods to help pork producers identify  the best approaches for protecting their herds from the airborne transmission of disease.
To assist pork producers in reducing the threat posed by the airborne transmission of disease causing pathogens, scientists working on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc are developing new methods to evaluate the effectiveness of various pre-filter and filter combinations.
Dr. Caroline Duchaine, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Bioinformatics with Laval University, explains there are several systems available, sometimes based on antimicrobial filtration and sometimes just standard filtration, so researchers are setting up protocols to test various filtration strategies.

Clip-Dr. Caroline Duchaine-Laval University:
We realise that there are very little options offered to the producers and the companies to evaluate the efficiency of the filter systems to either exclude or filtrate the biological components of the air contamination.
There's a lot that has been done on the dust concentration but it's not well understood how those filtration systems reduce the risk of transmitting or being contaminated by infectious agents through the airborne route.
In our proposal we will look at one virus and one bacteria.
The virus is PRRSv which is the most important viral disease in swine production in Canada, and we will also study the Streptococcus suis serotype 2 which is a bacterial pathogen, so those will be our two models.
But it's very important to mention that, once our system is working, we could study other types of infectious, bacterial, or viral agents in our systems.

Dr. Duchaine expects to have a workable evaluation system in place by April of 2016.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council