The identification of genetic traits that contribute to disease resilience in swine could become a mainstream approach to protecting pigs from diseases.
Since 2015 an international team of scientists is contributing to a natural disease challenge model established at the CDPQ wean to finish commercial research facilities in Quebec for evaluating the resilience of swine to disease.
Dr. John Harding, a Professor with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, said the facility exposes pigs to many of the same infections found in a commercial swine operation.
The key objective is to find indicator traits of resilience the researchers can measure in high health farms, nucleus or multiplication farms that will improve disease resilience when those animals move into commercial farms that are less healthy.
“Diseases are getting more complex; production systems are getting larger,” said Dr. Harding. “We have vaccines in our arsenal, but they’re not always 100 percent effective, and we don’t have vaccines for some very key diseases.”
He said the industry also has the issue of antibiotics becoming less available to them through their judicious use movement. And factors of resistance that are developing associated with use or overuse.
“The selection of genetically resilient pigs is a valuable tool that we hope will become mainstream at some point,” said Dr. Harding. “We’re not there yet, but there are certain companies that are starting to use some of the previous findings from PRRS and perhaps Circovirus and incorporating resilience traits into their genetic selection processes. We’re thinking that in the future, that will continue as we have more results from this natural disease challenge unit.”
Dr. Harding said they’d developed several approaches for identifying disease resilience; some are very promising, some are moving forward, and some require a bit more study. •
— By Harry Siemens