Canadian perspective on porcine epidemic diarrhea

摘要

The first time I recognized porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) causing severe clinical disease and high mortality in neonatal pigs was nearly a decade ago. I was in the Philippines for the first time, touring with veterinary friends and colleagues. We were working with a number of farms on disease prevention and mitigation strategies for various endemic diseases throughout the tegion. I had anticipated the on-farm discussion to focus largely on porcine circovirus, mycoplasma byopneumoniae, classical swine fever and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, all diseases common to the region and those that we had spent much of our pre-visit briefings discussing. Something else emerged though. Despite the farm, the discussion would invatiably,and often rather quickly, turn to the topic of PED virus. These farms wanted to talk about neonatal scours, pre-weaning mortality and if I could provide some insight and recommendations for practical control programs. Their descriptions of the aggressivenature of the virus was puzzling to me, they very much sounded like they were describing transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGE) and not PED. A review of theif diagnostics quickly showed that indeed, PED was the culprit in these cases and TGE simply wasn't involved. Walking through affected barns was eye opening, I was seeing severe clinical diarrhea and depending on their history you could see that some of these herds had little to no immunity whatsoever. I walked away from these first visits with my eyes wide open. This disease had changed!