Swine and poultry industry disease certification programs

The swine and poultry sectors have ‘national improvement plans’ to deal with diseases

16 July 2024

4 minute read

By: Chris Wright

North America

Editor's note: The following is from a paper by Jessica Higgins, DVM, Kalmbach Poultry LLC, Kalmbach Swine Management, Ohio, presented during the 2024 annual conference of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians.

The swine and poultry industries share multiple parallels in relation to production strategies, disease challenges, and even consumer pressure to meet specific medication and welfare standards. The last 40 to 50 years have allowed both industries to capitalize on significant technological advancements to efficiently raise more animals within an optimal space; yet recent market trends have demanded an increase in alternative production strategies focused on perceptions of animal welfare and medication usage.

Foreign animal disease risk is a key concern for both the poultry and swine industries. The poultry industry has needed to respond to US outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in 2015 and 2022; the latter, continuing into 2024, has resulted in the depopulation of over 60 million birds.

National Poultry Improvement Plan

The devastating effects of HPAI have prodded the poultry industry to continuously seek improved disease prevention and elimination strategies. Biosecurity and monitoring strategies included in certification programs like the National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP) have become the cornerstones to disease prevention and elimination for the poultry industry. There is no doubt that the effects of HPAI in the US would be much worse if the NPIP was not already in place.

As early as the 1930s, the NPIP was a collaborative effort between industry, state, and federal partners to provide standards for certifying the health status of poultry and egg flocks. It was first initiated to eliminate the spread of Pullorum Disease, caused by Salmonella pullorum that was widespread throughout the poultry industry with a devastating mortality rate greater than 80% in some cases. After the NPIPs initial success with eliminating Pullorum Disease from commercial flocks, the program has expanded to now include seven different diseases, including avian influenza.¹

The NPIP is used by more than 99% of the commercial scale poultry and egg operations across the US. It has also been integral to the poultry industry’s development of biosecurity principles that are used to consistently prevent and reduce the spread of disease between farms.

Swine Health Improvement Plan

The impact of foreign animal disease is not an unforeseen risk to the US swine industry with African swine fever (ASF) spreading throughout the world in recent years. Foreign animal disease preparedness for the US swine industry has the potential to benefit in multiple ways from the NPIP concepts that have been implemented nationally for nearly 100 years.

The US Swine Health Improvement Plan² (US SHIP) is an initiative modeled after NPIP, a program sponsored by USDA Veterinary Services with support from state and industry partners. The aim is to safeguard, improve, and represent the health status of swine across participating farm sites, like the NPIP platform. The initial objective is to develop and implement African swine fever (ASF) and classical swine fever (CSF) monitored certification of US pork production operations. It is based on the same principles used for the NPIP H5/H7 avian influenza monitored certification of US commercial poultry operations.

This approach would allow for critical continuity of business for swine operations in the face of a foreign animal disease outbreak in the US, which has been modeled in the poultry industry. It also has the potential to provide the format necessary to essentially eliminate a specific disease with the commercial swine industry, like it did for Pullorum Disease in the US commercial poultry industry.

Disease prevention strategies

Vaccination is the key to disease prevention in the layer industry, and it is becoming a common practice for chick maternal antibodies to be routinely monitored via serological surveys. The average layer pullet receives over 15 vaccinations by 16 weeks of age.

Serology is a commonly utilized tool for the swine industry, but it is not used to the same extent for understanding population immunity over time like it is in the poultry industry. Vaccination strategies can be fine-tuned with the use of molecular techniques to check vaccine administration compliance via PCR testing. These approaches have been employed in the swine industry, but there are significant differences between sample pooling techniques utilized between the two industries.

Whole genome sequencing techniques allow for more extensive isolate comparisons for better vaccine selection and have become more common in the swine industry. The advancements being utilized in the poultry industry allow for more focused activation of the immune system, which results in more rapid disease protection and elimination. These same concepts can be further utilized in the swine industry to aid in disease elimination.