It's time for a new era of communication in the swine industry one that you can get the latest updates while commuting or driving to Farms here. You will have the brightest minds of the global swine industry in your pocket how much prevention you want to put in place? It's just a how much risk is one willing to take and a lot of factors determine that if we think about the modes of transportation then think about each route of Entry can be a given risk level depending on the phase. Phase of production geography and other production system characteristics swine it podcast is only possible with the support of forward-looking and Innovative sponsors. Like the lawn codes previs sent a new purrs spective visit previs sent prrs dot U s-- to learn more Newt request experts serving producers and delivering breakthrough Solutions Genesis the first Power in genetics Xin Pro essential Trace. Exceptional performance every Pig a simple yet powerful Pig health and production management tool just stall always one step ahead in swine feeding. Welcome to finding podcast. My name is Marcel gonzalvez your host for today's episode this episode sponsor highlight is about just all celebrating its 25th anniversary. Just all manufacturers the original Wireless Standalone swine feeding. A system designed by pork producers for pork producers. They are simple reliable and provide Peace of Mind 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. Just stall is not just manufactured by an equipment company, but by a family pork production business with a slat level understanding just all always one step ahead in swine feeding. Hello everyone today we have dr. Jessica researcher, and the title of today's episode is course from Mystery disease to not so mysterious. Anymore, how are you today? Dr. Reser? I'm doing well. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us today. And first question is if you can share with us a little bit about your background in your career so far and how you got involved in pig production. Sure. So my road as this wine industry is under additional one. I didn't grow up with a lot of pigs, but I think there's more and more of us getting into the industry these days that don't have the pig background right? I grew up in West Virginia. It's a state known for coal mining and not really a A culture, but my parents had average-sized cow-calf farm. So I did grow up with livestock animals around me and really develop that passion for safeguarding the food through livestock production had a strong interest in the science behind Animal Health, too. So after attaining my Bachelors of Science degree from West Virginia University, I went on to attend North Carolina State University School of veterinary medicine, and it was really in North Carolina that my advice Visor, dr. Glenn almond and a fellow swine clinician. Dr. Butch Baker introduced me to the swine production mornings with the systems in eastern North Carolina through them. I created a pretty good Network within the swine industry and it didn't take me too many Summers to commit my career to this one industry very fortunate with my first career opportunity with close to home and Pennsylvania was Country View Family Farm their identity of the Clemens food group their drawers 65 Different styles and Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Indiana, and then there's 20 other Independent Producers that Supply Hogs to the to harvest facilities in Pennsylvania and Michigan so over the 10 years at Clemens, I oversaw all the animal health from birth to Market. They Animal Welfare programs including the implementation of third party animal welfare audits on farm and the animal handling program was in the plants to comply with Federal and customer requirements a few months ago. So I took the new career opportunity with a link of animal health as a senior technical consultant within the Slime business unit and I'm excited to be helping various swine producers and veterinarians in the Eastern Corn Belt region find solutions to their Animal Health needs and work with a diverse team at a link. Oh, very nice. Yeah, very active career so far and lots of production experience. We'd like to see that so yeah, let's Jump right into it then. Dr. Rue sir. Can you define purse? I'm sure most everyone is familiar, even though there's some folks in our audience audience that are lucky enough to not have that in their country. But if you can share the definition of purse and walk us through the brief history of it. Yeah, so I'm young enough to be fortunate or I'm not sure. Fortunate to know the u.s. Blind industry. I've always known it with her. So I should say I don't know it without first. So it is really second nature to me to think about the virus and how it impacts our production and biosecurity pers or its abbreviated prrs, v stands for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, but before the etiology was determined and the early 1990s the US industry referred to as mystery pig disease. Koch's postulates were fulfilled in 1991 with the etiology being a previously unrecognized RNA virus and so purges a small RNA envelope virus and it's highly host Pacific to replication in the porcine alveolar macrophages and in macrophages of other tissues and has been shown to replicate into V. You particular germ cells and infected boards as well. The nature of the RNA viruses is the rate of mutation and the ability of the fire. First to hide I guess for lack of a better word than become reactivated under periods of stress, which adds challenges for producers and Swine veterinarians in the control management and eradication of the virus from a heard it will replicate in the macrophages of lymphoid tissues and then spread rapidly throughout the body by the limbo fanatic route and we can see typically Peak firing me as patterns are 7 to 10 days post infection. However, the jury In a very me and varies depending on the strain the age of the pig co-infections and hacking immune system and several others several other items and but in some instances of Irina can persist for three months and individual Pig very good. Thanks for that background there. And what is the economic impact of course to the global sign industry? Yes. It's one of the most devastating diseases impacting the swine industry. Worldwide in 2013 whole camp and others calculated the impact of pers to the US swine industry as 664 million dollars per year that's around a hundred fifty Seven dollars per cell per year in the u.s. And then in Europe has been reported that average losses for purrs outbreaks were as made a hundred twenty six euros per South. I tried to convert the u.s. Dollars to Euros just to see if I could compare. Little bit and if I did the conversion correctly not sure if I did or not. It would be the u.s. Number would be around a hundred forty six euros per cell in the u.s. Okay for their brakes, very good. Yeah. It's a massive impact right there. And can you dive a little deeper on the symptoms and signs to watch for on purse sure if you're getting to the heart of my Production background and what I would be really looking for out in the field and as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of different pathogenic strains of hers be covid because of its rapid mutation. So this will impact the type of clinical science or observed and there's other critical factors that determining symptoms. Like I said before the age of the pigs is pretty important. You'll see more severe signs and pays better pre weaning versus post weaning and later in Finished or mature it's also important thing about what other pathogens are endemic in the herd and that impacts what clinical signs that you see in the barn. So mycoplasma influenza a Streptococcus newest tamakwa Parish Louis Circle virus, all of those can impact the severity of the clinical signs and of arm previous exposure is also important. Are you working with a heard that seem person before modulus or heterogeneous strains, or is it a completely naive? I've heard as the name of the virus indicates porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus. There's two bodies systems that are really impacted that you see visibly and positive animals to reproductive signs are found at the South farms and breeding herds and these symptoms don't really come in any particular order or start in any particular area of the barn. It really depends on how and where the virus enters the farm so that the people supplies transportation. Shannon's replacement animals, all of those can determine where or how the disease starts? So the beginning of a break with Styles typically have lethargy and a patent the mild fevers rapid spike in abortions and especially in that mid gestation phase and then as the virus enters the fairing Barnes to start to see the rate of stillborns and mummies and poor doing pigs at Birth rapidly increase and then consequently the pigs aren't nursing very well and that causes further. Complications and breeding and conception in the next turn for the South. So in my experience trains with the lower reproductive pathologist City. The first symptom may not be anything with the cells. It may be an increase in premium scours of the nursing pigs. It really varies and can cause a lot of confusion on farms of the team as to what the root cause of the issue is and what their next steps should be. So sometimes it's confusing if they're dealing with pers or not and mature boars. Early indicators a dip and semen production or Spike an abnormal cells. So they too can be symptomatic or asymptomatic from the observation of lethargy and evidence or fever the second part of the syndrome is a manifestation of respiratory signs and these can be observed in both the growing pigs amateurish line. It's a very easy usually age-dependent as well as dependent on co-infections many people. I've heard folks and production say that I have coughing pigs. I must have purrs and that's not really True so uncomplicated purrs where you just have Purge the virus in the pigs. They shouldn't be coughing. They're actually usually just over look are Jake and having a peninsula mild fever. But those that are used to seeing influence or a many of the bacterial pneumonias Whispers can see the coughing and some of the other clinical signs of the co-infection purse by itself can have a lot of ramifications on growth performance as the people take more days to get to accept your Market weight. For producers of the key performance indicator and but very financially critical. So as I said most purrs positive pigs are complicated with at least one or not more Co pathogens any of the influenza is mycoplasma. Those are many bacteria that cause pneumonia polyserositis. So often a producer on prognosis practitioners will observe clinically more of the endemic or co-infection ramifications. They'll see a spike in those symptoms versus that of just a perspire. Hours that triggers them to inquire more and dig more into why they're pigs aren't responding to the normal treatment practices. Very good very very clear and what to be strategies to prevent purse. So prevention strategies is a really good question because I would as a practitioner much rather prevent person have to address the aftermath of it in any part of production. So not all systems are veterinarians. Murmurs value prevention the same so it's pretty similar to an insurance policy. That's how much prevention you want to put in place is just too how much risk is one willing to take and a lot of factors determine that if we think about the modes of transportation then think about each route of Entry can be a given risk level depending on the phase of production geography and other production system characteristics. So things about lateral entry is through direct contact or indirectly. For fun so might that are carrying purse pyrus. I've often said that a somite is anything entering the farm other than the pigs already residing at the farm. So you think about that and think about all the stuff so we put into place for ourselves to enter the farms and our supplies that we bring in or new replacement animals. We can also think about this on a global war individual animal perspective. So it's important to ask ourselves. What is the objective or the prevention? Biosecurity practices limiting the disease entry into a country or region estate account E A Farm a barn on that farm or room or even maybe even just the individual farrowing style. So there's various levels of biosecurity and prevention that we can think about. There's a various aspects of Dimensions that we can be considered implied to hers or any of the other disease threats and I just think about this is a little side note but biosecurity and prevention practices for pers don't really only apply to pers they can apply to a lot of other domestic and foreign animal diseases. So that's important to remember just with all the other disease conversations that are happening you think these days worldwide but if we think about purrs and thing about foam Isis anything that can be carrying nasal secretions or any of the other bodily fluids that has presented and then we start placing standard operating procedures at each of those locations. Jen's and prevent the movement of those items or at least the cleaning and disinfection of these items between sites and I really did study that often resurfaces when were talking about prevention and it's a good one to scare people with is a reminder of the snowball study that dr. Scott D has done early on in the prison investigation in which he showed the mechanical transmission of hers that it can occur in normal swine production movement. Between farms and swine production offices during cold weather soper's does survive longer and colder temperatures. However has been shown to impact farms in all weather seasons and I highly recommend having biosecurity and monitoring practices in place all year round. We're pretty fortunate though that pers viruses quickly and activated through lipid Sullivant heat drying and at a pH level below 5 or above 7, so first we can consider a transportation. Equipment at minimum Transportation equipment needs to be cleaned and disinfected and allowed to dry in between loads at all stages of production and the drying times and take the most time the drying step but especially in the middle of winter and Midwest United States. It's really tough to get Transportation equipment dry. So many in the u.s. Blind industry have turned to trailer Bakers. So if you use the temperature in their favor to prevent the purse transmission, so following routine cleaning and disinfection. a jurors, the transportation equipment is based to a minimum of a hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit and then held for a preset amount of time and I know not all Farms have this equipment in place, but it is a pretty neat way to use technology and the characteristics of the virus thing susceptible to drying and heat to prevent that transmission between Farm Me another way to do it. If you don't have this that equipment and place is to just restrict movement between farms and said of preset number of nights down away from pigs for equipment and people and supplies that the everything can be cleaned and disinfected and have time to dry the same cleaning and disinfection and drying procedures can be put into place for smaller equipment or supplies used in the industry many of our breeding herds have fumigation rooms and Small Supply items are placed into and then fumigated or fog with a disinfectant that and then allowed time to dry before they're entered into the farm. There's another technology that many farms you and it's been shown effective for person ultraviolet light exposure. This is a convenient for smaller supplies or personal items that are taken across the clean dirty line and that was clean dirty lines brings up another very critical piece to buy it. Security and clean dirty lines we talked about a lot. That's the pre-identified line that indicates a step or procedure needs to be taken the depending on the stage of production and the type of program. So Farm is under will determine the steps taken if there are various line staggered coming into the site as an example of breeding herd may have three separate barriers to entry versus a finisher that shipping pigs directly to market for bringing her. They have a gate at the end of the day. I've way to restrict any vehicle traffic on site or to indicate that if a vehicle is coming on site and needs to be cleaned and disinfected a second barrier may be that an individual getting out of the vehicle would put on shoe covers and then third before they enter into the farm. They have to shower and change into clothing. That's Farm specific. Whereas it a finisher that has Market animals. They're just maybe that last barrier of a clean dirty line where they're changing into Farm specific cover. Girls and Boots, so those differences of how many steps we put into place considering what the life cycle of the pigs are on the farm if it's continuous flow of breeding herd if it's all in all out by sight if it's fair to finish fair to wean. We need to finish a nursery or just finishing all of those have to be taken into consideration when designing the biosecurity program for a farm and even inside of Arm to so we don't want to forget about internal biosecurity and those internal biosecurity procedures really come become really important when we're talking about that. We've had a break and then we're trying to minimize movement within a farm or just indifferent Barnes on the same site. So those are important procedures in place between animals on the same Farm we can also think about natural barriers. Probably not enough credit. Has given to those or maybe lack there of some natural barriers and some parts of the US industry. So in my part of the world where I was practicing there's mountains and trees and shrubs and we took those two advantage to change the air flow to and from farms and create a natural filtration system, but in Geographic areas that are flat and without natural barriers actually tend to be where most of the dense hog populations are and the United States because of the availability of Gray. It's for feed so farms in those regions are more likely to build some positive filtration systems just because they don't have the natural filtration systems around them and that helps to prevent the aerial spread of pers between Farms. That's very interesting. And it may I think about some farms in Brazil where there's a lot of trees around the farms and and like a natural barrier. But but you made a good point a lot of the pig dancer. Errors in the u.s. Don't have that natural naturally there. So be expensive probably to to plant those as well and take up a lot of important grain crop land. Yeah. So other just a couple other things on prevention of biosecurity that I like to emphasize when I'm talking about. This is people travel and we're traveling more and more across the country and internationally, but it's also surprising to hear about how pigs travel so you Pigs are getting on airplanes as well these days so we can't drop the ball and asking about travel internationally across the country or email local travel into livestock auctions or fairs. We also want to think about when we're purchasing animals. Where are they coming from? What is their her status or pathogen risk that we're going to be bringing in? So it's always important to have those Veterinary discussions between your veterinarian and the veterinarian of the source heard to understand those risks that we would Breathe. Bringing into our herd and then lastly is diagnostic surveillance, not really prevention, but more of a monitoring of the herd statuses and understanding risk of spreading occurs from Farm to farm and there's some really easy technology with the oral fluid technology for folks to get samples of various ages of pigs on a routine basis and we can test those through the polymerase Chain Reaction, which is the PCR or for antibody responses through Eliza test. Very nice said it's amazing the the amount of you know, knowledge that there is and protocols than can be put in place. And like I said the most interesting part is that everything that Implement to that to purse it's going to help with a lot of other diseases. So that's that's very cool. And once you got that in place, you know, it turns out to be a pretty cost-effective way of Control preventing for so that's that's nice. How about controlling was it's already infected what to be some thoughts on that. Yes. Unfortunately a farm can have all those prevention procedures in place and still break with purrs. So that's when we start thinking about control and stabilization and maybe if a farm is lucky to have a successful history of keeping purrs out they can consider elimination program. So research and Sir control methods have been emphasized a lot more in breeding herds than grow finish just because of The Continuous Flow and age of the animals at the breeding herd Farms versus a all in all out finishing barn, but the first step though is to consider the site's history how the virus entered the farm and can those risks be removed for the long term and that applies to both the breeding herds in the grow finishers. So knowing the area helps to predict what types of programs will be. Therefore the future so for breeding hers, we often talk about our breeding her closure. And this is a sequence of events that includes a load close exposed and stabilize the farm so prior to a closure a breeding herd will receive additional gilts and this is the load phase and it's important that the farm has guilt to maintain breathe through the closure and then the farm is closed. So once they're loaded they have the additional guilt that they knit. Need then the farm is close to no more new entries of animals as the farm is as Fair as a theater or finish is really important for producers to consider moving pigs off-site for that grow finish phase and the goal with that is to minimize. The number of animals on site that has less exposure or a more naive in a logical status to the particular virus because you really want to be able to get all the animals on site that the same. Put her in the same immune status to that particular virus next is exposure. So that's how we're going to do it. These methods have evolved over time. So breeding herds, however, multiple break and control control strategies have shown that all the animals on site really need to be exposed to the live virus or an attenuated virus of similar genetic characteristics and vaccination of all the breeding animals on site with a commercially available Modified by vaccine is the most Amin route for this exposure and then the last step is stabilization and monitoring through the remainder of the heard closure and this is where the internal biosecurity practices become pretty important and the mid 1990s. The term make Rubble was coined by dr. Monte McCall and the procedures focused on minimizing transmission occurs within the throwing Barn between litters of pigs in this is especially during standard operating processes such as ear notching tail. Talking and injection of medications and vaccines during this phase of the control attenuated Modified by vaccines also continue to be utilized to reduce the shedding of virus with them and from the farm foreclosures are monitored through the piglet very Mia at Birth and at weaning and they are the most naive animals on site with the least established immune system to fight the virus. So ultimately at the end of our her closure with the purpose of elimination the piglets need to have shown. A consistent negative by PCR throughout the screening phase and the length of time it takes to accomplish. This is really strain and heard specific. There are very pathogenic strains that move faster a population While others take longer to move and develop that immune response that's needed. So I mentioned the purse attenuated or modified live vaccines using stabilizing breeding herds, but these can also be used in are commonly used in the ministration to piglets that Be negative or positive at the time of winning but are being transported and grown out in positive Geographic areas. So these vaccines have shown to reduce firing Mia decrease shedding and improve the growth of pigs through Market, very interesting that makes total sense Jessica. What Abby from the what would be the latest in deepest understanding of purse today in another words. What's new with pores? Yes, there are Angels have dedicated their careers to studying this virus. And if you think about it, the last 30 years the industry has obtained a lot of scientific literature on various aspects of the virus the diagnostic tools prevention strategies as well as control and management methods. And so the uniquor may be frustrating trade occurs in the disease that manifests is the variation and change. It seems from the perspective of me being a recent partition the field it was as soon as we thought we had it figured out. Change that mutated or we combined with something different and so it Alters the passenger City. We find it in a new location that shift service level for transmission to knife heard some more recent technology that's being applied to the field is whole genome sequencing and traditionally the or five Jean of the virus is what was sequenced to determine if a clinical picture is new from is the from a different strain or if it's a similar strain of a previous break within the system or and endemic strain, but what we're finding is that strain aren't matching what we're getting on our sequences at matching what we're seeing in the field from our history and a lot of the large production systems and veterinary clinics. They use a lot of big data sets connect the sequence of or five to the performance of the pigs of what they're seeing in a lot of the clinical history and Diagnostics and we're starting to build this picture, but then when it doesn't match up over time, we're starting to ask a lot more questions and in these cases the whole genome sequencing Wharton and it's helping us to understand that whole virus of more specifically about is it recombining with other strains? And I hope that we can also learn a lot more from and I think where there's a lot more that we can learn about pathogenicity and then even more about the strain itself. Is it going to elicit more of a reproductive or respiratory clinical picture? And I think there's a lot more that we can learn from it, but it's a new diagnostic tool that is getting closer to the field to the pig. Egg and then a secondary research that I don't know that we have a lot of information on but there are people working on it is the question regarding how perspires takes advantage of the pigs immune system and our their Technologies are methods that we can actually block that and use it as a more broad spectrum intervention. They good if you could write one thing about birds on a billboard for all pay producers and fund professionals to read when they are dry. Ring what? Would that be as I'm not a real big marketing creative person. I tend to lean more on the technical information. So this is probably the hardest question that you had I thought about it and I was just came up with Safeguard your barn purrs this changing interesting very good anything else some purse. Dr. Jessica before we move to the three questions. That we ask every guest. Hey, so I was thinking through these questions and preparing for the discussion. I really stopped to think about I hear a lot of presentations from leadership development on the different generations of people and so Society categorises Generations based on what they know or have experience and I just think about the new practitioners in the field today even myself. I've been in practice for 10 years. And we don't know a u.s. Lime industry without purse and so there's a few of us that can remember when serco virus came in before the vaccines were available and we can remember life before porcine epidemic diarrhea, but fewer and fewer of the swine industry remembers life before pers and so I've heard many people say that so we have it and we have to learn to live with it. But I really do want to see us challenge ourselves as an mystery that we can get back to maybe living without it again. And so I believe it is important for us to continue to share experiences and learnings from the early days of the mystery pig disease and apply those to new technologies and Diagnostics that we have to really push ourselves forward. They nice see I think that's a honorable goal to have for sure as industry since 1971 Xin Pro Corporation has focused on one thing. Mineral nutrition as the most research proven organic feed Trace mineral products in the industry Xin Pro performance minerals deliver performance and profitability to swine operations around the globe to know more go to Xin Pro.com. It is thiem to our fails. What is your favorite swine related book, so Oh, I'm pretty traditional at the diseases of swine book. It's my favorite. I have that I would bet money. That was your favorite book for sure. What's your favorite book in general outside of pig production? So traditionally my book would be Pride and Prejudice enjoy watching the movies as well. But in a spreading often, but more recently a really good book that I've read that can apply. Having more to others is a book called Never split the difference by Chris ba very good. It's about negotiation this in life. I mean, even I listened to him speak and he taught me how to negotiate with my three-year-old at bedtime to get him to go to bed. So it's a great book for Life. Very nice. I love that book as well. Yeah. His experience says that I believe was FBI, right the best that go she ate her from FBI is amazing, correct. Yep, very good, and lastly in your opinion what separates successful science professionals from those that are not so I really believe in proactive adaptation to change so not being reactive but really thinking ahead looking towards the future or what predicting what changes are coming. Very nice. Very good doctor Jessica. We appreciate your time today. Thanks so much, and we'll be in touch. Okay. Thank you.
“How much prevention you want to put in place? It is just how much risk is one willing to take. And a lot of factors determine that... if we think about the modes of transportation and think about each route of entry can be giving risk level, depending on the phase of production, geography, and other production system characteristics.” – Dr. Jessica Risser. Today’s episode will cover “PRRS: From "mystery disease" to not so mysterious anymore”. Our guest is Dr. Jessica Risser, Elanco’s Senior Technical Consultant. Jessica joined Elanco after 10 years at Country View Family Farms, before that, she received a Bachelor’s of Science in Agricultural Biochemistry from West Virginia University, a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from North Carolina State University, and completed the Executive Veterinary Program for Swine Veterinarians at the University of Illinois. What you will learn:   The brief history of PRRS;  Economic impact of PRRS to the global swine industry;   Latest and deepest understanding of PRRS;   What separates successful swine professionals from those that are not. Jessica’s favorite swine-related book: Diseases of Swine Jessica’s favorite book unrelated to swine: Pride and Prejudice and Never Split the Difference Edited by Lauro Faccin 