Viral pathogens and diseases of swine are a top priority for the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC) because of the risk they present to the U.S. swine herd by virtue of their ability to travel and transmit disease. SHIC also takes seriously the potential for bacteria, which can also be pathogens, to cause emerging disease.
To provide needed information on bacteria, SHIC recently executed a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Georgia Research Foundation to become a member of the Global Infectious Disease Intelligence Consortium and work with the Foundation’s Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases (CEID).
The objective is to add another source of relevant information about existing and emerging infectious diseases. The result? Better intel on possible emerging bacteria to go along with existing information on potential emerging viruses.
One CEID project collected a dataset of known bacteria-host pairs (both wildlife and livestock), and tables of bacteria and host life history traits, SHIC reported. After development of a machine learning model looking at a subset of this dataset, data was generated that could help predict potential bacterial spillovers from wildlife into swine. So far, known bacteria-host pairs were collected from the Enhanced Infectious Diseases (EID2) Organisms Interactions Database, Global Mammal Parasite Database, as well as Shaw et al. (2020, Molecular Ecology).
From this, 4.648 known bacteria-host pairs, 1,222 mammal hosts and 1,665 bacterial pathogens were identified. CEID will add data on pathogenicity of bacteria to predict a more quantifiable risk to the pork industry as the project progresses.
Strep equi spp zooepidemicus (S. zoo) is one example of bacterial spillover between species and was added to the SHIC Swine Bacterial Disease Matrix in February 2021. In adding S. zoo to the Swine Bacterial Disease Matrix, the potential public health impact, the need for more efficacious intervention tools, diagnostic capabilities, potential impact on swine health, welfare and production and potential market impacts were all considered. A fact sheet focused on S. zoo was added to the SHIC Fact Sheet library as well.
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