Innovative approaches to improve health and decrease antibiotic use

in the swine industry

Robert B. Morrison, DVM, MBA, PhD

College of Veterinary Medicine

University of Minnesota

The effort to maintain, and in many cases, improve the health and performance of pig farms is ongoing and relentless. Veterinarians serving the industry are constantly challenged to develop innovative and effective methods to accomplish this. The industry has gone through a remarkable restructuring in the last 15 years with consolidation and integration at its core. While this has helped resolve and even eliminate some diseases (e.g. trichinosis, swine dysentery, pseudorabies), it has made others more pronounced (PRRS). The challenge to innovate and implement effective control strategies is huge.

Examples of innovative strategies include PRRS virus elimination, parity segregation, new vaccines, light pig recovery centers and antibiotic sensitivity databases. PRRS is a new disease that first hit our industry about 15 years ago. Today, it is considered to be the single most costly disease affecting the industry. A recent breakthrough has been the development of methods to eliminate the virus from the breeding herds. However, the current challenge is that too many herds become reinfected. A second innovation is parity segregation. This refers to the recent observation that offspring born from young females do not perform as well as offspring from older females. As farms have grown in size and complexity, some have started rearing these offspring separately and appreciated substantial enhancement in health and performance of both groups. New vaccines and light pig recovery centers are other innovations that appear promising. And finally, as diagnostic labs have started to store data electronically, veterinarians can access the history of a particular farm or even their entire practice to tabulate sensitivity patterns by bacteria isolated, age of pig and tissues affected to improve their selection of antimicrobial.

As we move ahead in the swine industry, we are increasingly aware of the benefits and risks of antibiotic use. Despite our health improvement innovations, nature hates a vacuum, and disease will continue in its epidemic and endemic forms. To help us balance the benefits and risks of antibiotic use, we have developed a simple model that simulates a disease outbreak within a pig farm and compares medication options. As we use antibiotics, we balance the health benefits to the pigs with the risks to public health. Models such as this one will first be descriptive in an attempt to help us discuss the benefits and risks of antibiotic use and routes delivered.

Contact: Robert Morrison, DVM, MBA, PhD, University of Minnesota, 385 Animal Science / Veterinary Medicine, 1988 Fitch Ave, St Paul, MN 55108, Tel: 612/625-9276, Fax: 612/625-1210, Em: BobM@umn.edu