The executive director of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians Dr Tom Burkgren has said that while producers and veterinarians have demonstrated success in ridding individual swine operations of PED, eradication of the virus on a national scale is still a long way off.

Although losses resulting from PED in the United States have fallen dramatically from one year ago, there is still some circulation of the virus.

Dr Burkgren said that the diligence with which producers and veterinarians have approached biosecurity has really paid off and, anecdotally, the immune status of the US sow herd has improved from one year ago, but full scale eradication is still a long way off.

Dr Tom Burkgren-American Association of Swine Veterinarians:

The topic of eradication has been explored primarily as a possibility for the future, in terms of trying to assess the nature of the virus, the strength of immunity, the length of immunity and then what resources would be needed.

I don't know that anybody has progressed very far down that road because I still think that we do need some answers to some of those questions particularly about immunity, the strength of that immunity and the length of it.

If we don't have very long immunity or the immunity can be overcome just by viral load that wouldn't bode very well for the possibility of eradication.

I think if you're talking eradicating within a system that's a little different.

I think we've got a lot of veterinarians, producers with enough experience to know how to get the virus out of the system but when you start talking either regional or national eradication that's a much different effort and level of resources needed.

Dr Burkgren said that the level of communication among producers and veterinarians is really unprecedented right now so, if there is a silver lining to that PED cloud, it's that we have much better communication on PED as well as other disease control and those types of efforts.

Further Reading

Find out more information on PED by clicking here.