There is no one set of rules for establishing a routine health testing protocol for pig herds. Rather, a producer needs to review their individual needs and goals — and their budget, of course — to create an achievable screening program.

Two Strategies

Carthage Veterinary Service Associate Veterinarian Elise Toohill, DVM, described two categories of routine testing. One is baseline monitoring of how well one’s current swine health program is doing. Such a program encapsulates all a producer is doing to keep their pigs healthy and set them up for success — beginning with the vaccination and acclimation of replacement gilts into the sow herd, through additional measures for the sow before being bred and prior to farrowing to prepare her to extend maximum genetic immunity to her piglets.

This category of testing also surveys the effectiveness of measures to protect the new piglets, including vaccines and antibiotics given and feed and water medications, from nursery through grow-finish stages.

The second category of routine diagnostics is to gauge an operation’s biosecurity risks and protocols. A producer might elect to do baseline testing of their animals before instituting a new protocol, such as washing market trailers, and then follow up sometime later with comparison tests to gauge if the investment to make that change was worthwhile. Or, if they experience a clinical outbreak of the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) virus in the finishing period, they may institute routine testing before that stage to understand when and how often sites are breaking and if further biosecurity protocols are warranted to prevent future breaks.

In deciding on what specific testing protocols to put in place, Toohill noted, “It varies depending on the virus or bacteria because some are easier to treat with antibiotics and vaccines, so it depends on which ones we can accurately test status in herds and more easily prevent or control.”

One such pathogen is circovirus. Under normal circumstances, the vaccine is effective, so pigs shouldn’t contract the disease. If a producer decides to do regular testing of their sow herds for processing fluids and the results begin consistently showing the presence of the virus in significant quantities, that might indicate it’s an unstable sow herd that has some factors that may interfere with the vaccine’s ability to work. Another example she gave is if a producer may do diagnostic monitoring for circovirus during a herd’s finishing period to establish if their vaccine protocol is the correct one to use, with respect to factors such as product used, timing or dosing.

Testing Stages

Toohill explained producers who own multiple sow farms and/or multiple flows of pigs tend to do routine testing of their animals more often because there’s more diversity in health status and they are highly incentivized by biosecurity requirements to keep a close eye on pathogens such as PRRSv moving site-to-site.

What most producers tend to do is wait for the clinical signs of an illness, then test for diagnosis or confirmation. “The routine diagnostics, by contrast, is really dependent on the client and the producer, and it depends on what level,” she said. “I would say a very small percentage are doing regular diagnostics before the pigs get sick, fewer than 20 percent of producers in the industry.”

Some of her recommendations for routine diagnostics begin in the farrowing house, testing very young animals’ diarrhea for shedding viruses to gauge the effectiveness of the sow pre-farrow immunization and gilt acclimation programs. “Knowing what bugs or viruses you’re dealing with in your piglet diarrhea can be good to have, to know whether you need to change your program,” Toohill said.

In the nursery stage, she recommends testing any post-weaning diarrhea, as it can be caused by multiple factors and the producer needs to know what bacteria or viruses they should be targeting for ongoing prevention (and switch up the program when needed). Grow-finish testing might include conditions such as mycoplasma, ileitis and swine influenza, depending on the specific biosecurity protocols or frequent illnesses an individual producer is experiencing in their herds.

In fact, if a producer consistently sees coughing weaned pigs, there is value in carrying out monthly or quarterly diagnostic nasal swabs to determine if it’s influenza or parainfluenza, and what strains, in order to better target those viruses with a control program going forward.

Toohill suggested picking timeframes to do sample tissue testing to get a good handle on what is happening in the health of finishing pigs — for example, within a week of placement, then at the end of the nursery period and again in the middle of finishing. “Pick three different timeframes, and do that quarterly at the least-often frequency if you want to really know what you’re dealing with,” she added.

“As we as an industry move toward more responsible use of antibiotics, understanding the endemic bacteria that pigs have routinely is going to become more important, especially if we start to rely more on autogenous vaccines instead of antibiotics to keep our pigs healthy. Those are situations where the regular tissue diagnostics are going to be important, and valuable.”

Actionable Results

Toohill recommends producers start with the mindset that they’re going to abide by the results of testing they settle upon; and that they be willing to adjust the testing program for need, cost and other factors they determine are most important. “When we’re submitting diagnostic tests, we have to ask ourselves, ‘If we get X results, are we going to do something different as a result of those diagnostics?’ If you aren’t, why spend the money?” she asked.

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