The Swine Health Information Centre has approved a research project which will examine the risk of transmitting the virus responsible for Foot and Mouth Disease through feed.
Research by the Pipestone Research Group, South Dakota State University and Kansas State University conducted in collaboration with the Swine Health Information Centre showed different viruses are able to survive in feed during transport from China or Eastern Europe to the United States.
Swine Health Information Centre Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says USDA’s Agricultural Research Service on Plum Island has been asked to look at the infectivity of Foot and Mouth Disease given normal feeding behavior.
FMD is a very infective virus. It’s easily transmitted from animal to animal. It’s easily transmitted by fomites. In other words it could infect animals from picking up the virus from somebody’s boots or from a transport carrier like a truck or tires so it’s easily transmitted among animals.
The real question that isn’t answered, this is a new question that nobody’s looked at before of the infectivity of FMD in normal feeding behavior. FMD can infect pigs if you inoculate them with FMD orally. You can squirt FMD down their throat and they’ll become infected but we don’t know what dosage is needed in feed, in feeding behaviors to be able to do the same thing. So we’re going to put different levels of the virus into feed and provide that to pigs as they would eat and we’re going to test the level of virus needed to infect those pigs.
~ Dr. Paul Sundberg, Swine Health Information Centre
Dr. Sundberg says work will be conducted at the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s a high level biosecurity laboratory on Plum Island and he hopes to have at least preliminary data by the end of the year.
