SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — A segment of the Illinois Pork Expo, held Feb. 10-11 at the Bank of Springfield Center, focused on porcine disease prevention. A seminar held by Clayton Johnson, DVM, director of veterinary services for Carthage Veterinary Services of Carthage, Ill.,examined current disease rates for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) and porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED). Johnson also updated producers with the latest information on California’s Proposition 12 and similar actions in other states.

Beginning his presentation with positive news, Johnson reported that cumulative incidences of both PRRS and PED in sows are so far very low compared with past years based on the 12-month period of July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024. “For PED it is actually a very good year,” he said. 

“If you have a sow in the U.S., you have a 95 percent chance of going through a year without seeing PED, which is a very good thing. As for PRRS, we’re tied for the second-best year, and we’re tied with last year. This year, relative to other years — knock on wood — the outbreak percentage is as low as we have generally seen.”

“For PRRS and PED, I think the numbers are primarily down due to health challenged assets exiting the pork business over the last several years of strained financials for pig farmers.  We’ve seen industry contraction in 2023 and 2024, and the sow farms that have contracted have generally been the more health challenged farms that we have as a collective industry.”

The Carthage hog vet stressed biosecurity during his presentation, calling it key to keeping PRRS and PED out of the barn. “I’m seeing a lot more investment in video cameras to audit biosecurity in the past couple of years,” he said. “It’s awkward when you start putting video cameras in place to watch what people do, but if you look at it from my perspective as a veterinarian occasionally I get hired to go to a person’s barn because there has been a PRRS outbreak, and the (question) is always the same: why did we get PRRS, and what can we do to make sure we don’t get it again?”

Johnson recommended security cameras as a foolproof way to determine exactly how breaches of secure zones occur. “If you have video cameras and I can watch, say, the last 30 days of what happened at your mortality removal, your wean pig loadout, your supply entry, I can tell you if those things were done right or wrong during that period,” he said. 

Common places producers are placing video cameras for biosecurity include staff and supply entry points, pig entry and loadout areas, mortality loadout locations and any other areas where ‘“clean and dirty lines,” or CDLs, should be established, according to Johnson, who works with his clients to determine the optimal locations for security cameras — which can also include parking lots — within their operations. Equipment that comes and goes from a sow barn is also a common vector for porcine diseases and should be classified by producers as a CDL zone.

“A CDL is the perimeter of the farm where we expect biosecurity events to happen. One could be sanitation, so the shower is a CDL because people have to shower there,” he said. “With PRRS and PED, they just need one mistake; that multi-million dollar problem just takes one bad event to happen. We have to get to this level of detail if we want to prevent it over a long period of time.”

Johnson said he can envision a time when PED will be completely eradicated from the U.S. swine herd. 

“Elimination is what we do on a farm; eradication is what we do in a region or a country. The disease has to be relatively low in prevalence, and we are at one percent prevalence of outbreaks in the past six months. The disease cannot be a chronic one, and PED is not that, and we need to know how to get rid of it from individual farms, and with PED we’re pretty good at that,” he said. “We have the right raw ingredients to be able to get rid of PED at the country level, with better improvements on finishing and the slaughterhouse.”

Johnson devoted a portion of his presentation to a discussion about Proposition 12, which affects animal housing sizing, and its relation to swine health. He is concerned that hog producers are not in the driver’s seat of Prop 12 discussions nationally. 

“We are responding to legislative and regulatory actions, and I don’t think we want to be there long-term,” Johnson said. “There is already a bill in New York for Prop 12-plus, so instead of 24 square feet (of confinement space) it’s 32 square feet per sow. In Oklahoma there is a powerful foundation with full intentions of getting a ballot initiative for Prop 12-plus. California is aware of the New York (proposal) and is willing to amend their regulations to go to 32 feet from 24 if it passes.”

These initiatives, while well-meaning, would have bad consequences for pigs, according to the veterinarian. “As veterinarians we need to stand up and say that some of these things don’t make sense. However, I think that all of us in this industry have to think about the market access piece. There should always be the opportunity for niche programs,” Johnson said. “Somebody is going to have to propose some national minimum housing standard everyone can agree on, otherwise it’s going to be state by state.”