16 April 2025

3 minute read

By: Lee Williamson

North America

Dr. Brian Payne, a veterinarian with VPS based in Minnesota, USA, spoke to The Pig Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the 50^th Leman Swine Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota in mid-September 2024. Brian had a poster presentation at the conference.

Let's start by talking about Streptococcus suis (S. suis) in nursery pigs. What are you seeing in the field?

Strep suis is certainly in the field all the time. In fact, the United States Swine Health Information Center (US SHIP) would say that strep is the number two diagnosed disease across all the VDLs (veterinary diagnostic laboratories) just behind PRRS. It's certainly out there. People are still struggling with it and looking for solutions whether it's prevention or treatment.

What are some solutions that are available to manage and mitigate S. suis?

If we talk about prevention, which is not the focus of it, there are autogenous vaccines that people are trying to use, but sometimes they're still struggling with it. VPS focuses on treatment. For well over 25 years, we've provided compounded amoxicillin to the industry that's been widely used, and people continue to use. VPS continues to develop upon it. We're excited that we have new innovations here and new innovations coming.

What we really wanted to focus on with this research project was helping the practitioner decide which antibiotic to use. We talk about Animal Medicinal Drug Use Clarification Act (AMDUCA), and the decision tree in which to use labeled products, extra labeled products and down to compounded products. Through this research project, we're able to show evidence that amoxicillin has its place in the industry today; it had the highest average daily gain (ADG), the lowest mortality and the best clinical signs out of any of the treatment groups.

What does this research really mean for producers?

We looked at three distinct levels of amoxicillin. Sometimes today, people are using low doses or high doses, and this was evaluating the different dosages: low, medium and high. We found that a higher dose given early on was able to prevent more diseases. 

If we look at where people in the industry are struggling today, they're having to do a lot of re-treatments. They'll treat the pigs one time and then they'll have to treat more pigs individually, or they'll have to do more mass treatments later. If we can get the right dose early on, we can save more pigs and we can save more money and use less antibiotics overall.

Our focus is doing the right things for the farmers and for the pigs. If we can save more pigs with less antibiotics overall and at less cost, that's our goal.

Reference

Payne, B. (2024) Clinical and production response from pigs with different oral beta lactam protocols in response to a Streptococcus suis challenge. 2024 Allen D. Leman Swine Conference Research Abstracts & Proceedings (p. 151). Regents of the University of Minnesota. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OROBatOG5E5wtOLeENpS_h2aBvaMP9Sl/view