To successfully manage and control endemic porcine respiratory disease, pig producers must identify and understand what pathogens exist in their herds and how they’re challenging their pigs.
MSD Animal Health is encouraging vets and producers to take advantage of its upgraded suite of diagnostic tools and use its Vetcheck, Respicheck and audit services as part of their herd health management programmes.
These exclusive MSD services, that include PRRS Elisa (Vetcheck) and PCR tests (Respicheck), are available through veterinary practices and can be used to assess specific diseases such as PRRS, PCV2 and swine flu.
amples can be taken from blood or from pigs’ saliva, collected using cotton ropes suspended in their pens. The results can help to evaluate a herd’s health status with regard to a particular disease, determine its prevalence within the population and aid clinical decisions when choosing the most appropriate course of action.
“PRRS can be a particularly difficult disease to control on-farm, due to its complex and multifactorial nature,” says MSD’s technical manager, pig vet Ricardo Neto. “An immunisation programme is usually needed to control this disease, but our services can help vets and producers to understand how other areas, such as management, biosecurity and hygiene can influence the disease status and what interventions might be needed to improve it.”
MSD has also revamped its Respig herd audit and economic simulator tool, which is available free to producers through their vet, and the pig team’s recently appointed account support manager, Caroline Blaken, will help to roll out respig.com to veterinary practices during the next few months.
This internet-based service identifies areas of improvement and any physical and financial outcomes associated with any potential respiratory control and prevention strategy. It complements the diagnostics now available, and offers pig producers another means of benchmarking their investments in health control programmes.
For more information visit: www.respig.com