Research underway at South Dakota State University, in which scientists are simulating the movement from China across the ocean to Iowa of feed ingredients contaminated by microorganisms, shows imported feed ingredients are capable harboring the pathogens that cause disease in swine.

Dr Scott Dee, the Director of Research with Pipestone Applied Research, a part of Pipestone Veterinary Services, says the study started out by looking at feed ingredients inoculated with PED virus and has been expanded.

Dr Scott Dee-Pipestone Applied Research:

Similar to what we saw with PED work, products that are soy based seem to be very supportive for what ever reason.

Lysine seems to be repeatable, choline seems to be repeatable and it seems to also depend on the structure of the virus.

If the virus is very stable, it's living longer.

If they virus is very labile outside the host, for example it dies quickly, dries out, those don't make it across the ocean so to speak.

What we hope to do is a couple of things.

Just raise the awareness that feed ingredients could be risk factors for disease transmission.

That's really never been done before.

The second is to identify what are the high risk combinations?

Then hopefully we can talk about, is it possible to treat those ingredients with a mitigant that would reduce virus survival somehow?

Do we make sourcing decisions and buy from countries who produce more internally that have a safe health status versus a country with a lot of foreign animal diseases.

Dr Dee says work on four viruses has been completed and scientists are wrapping up the last six.
He expects the study to be completed mid-way through 2017.