The British pig industry is on red alert, in a bid to prevent an outstandingly virulent pig disease from entering the country. Until more is known about transmission routes of porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus, the industry is focusing in particular on a specialist feed ingredient for young pigs—spray-dried porcine plasma.
Positive polymerase chain reaction tests in the States and bioassay tests by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have pointed to spray-dried porcine plasma (SDPP) as an ingredient being capable of containing porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDv), but not that it is necessarily capable of actually transmitting the disease. Further tests are ongoing in the hope of getting a clearer picture.
But specialist pig vets say that if PEDv arrived in Britain it would spread quickly through the nation's naive pig population, causing incalculable damage, so industry organisations are urging producers to take every precaution, even though the case against SDPP is unproven.
BPEX, National Pig Association, Pig Veterinary Society, the Agricultural Industries Confederation and British Pig Association have joined forces to keep PEDv out of the country.
NPA chairman Richard Longthorp said, “We are clear that we don’t want to be looking back in a few months, and wish we had been more cautious. We are all agreed in the pig sector that we should close off every avenue of risk and potential risk for the time being.”
Current estimates suggest that in the United States alone PEDv could kill as many as 5 million piglets before the national herd starts to develop antibodies against the virus, equivalent to 4.5 percent of all pigs sent to slaughter.
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
