Researchers Examine Role of CPV2 in Causing Disease in Pigs

Research being conducted on behalf of the Swine Health Information Center is examining the pathogenicity in pigs of canine parvovirus type-2

Researchers with South Dakota State University are evaluating the role of canine parvovirus 2 in causing disease in pigs.

Dr. Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center, says the study was launched after diagnostic testing performed on archived lung samples identified the presence of several microorganisms, including CPV2.

“As far as I know this is the first time it’s ever been tried but we’re going to test that because the evidence shows that it is a virus that has been found in lung tissue“

“There’s two pieces to this project with South Dakota State University. One is to continue looking over the archived lung samples and different tissue samples to see if we can find canine parvovirus as a specific pathogen where we thought something else might have been causing the problem.

“We’re going to look at the archived samples to see if canine parvovirus can be found in other tissues and whether it might be found by itself or found in conjunction with other pathogens.

“The other piece of this is that we are going to take the canine parvovirus and we are going to expose colostrum deprived pigs with it. They’re clean pigs, don’t have other pathogens and we’re going to test its pathogenicity.

“We don’t know what the outcome of that is going to be. As far as I know this is the first time it’s ever been tried but we’re going to test that because the evidence shows that it is a virus that has been found in lung tissue especially and we want to understand if canine parvovirus, as a primary virus when nothing else is present, can be a pathogen itself.”

Dr. Sundberg says this is going to be done quickly. He expects, within the next six months, to have the results of both the archived sample look as well as the exposure to the naive pigs to see if CPV2 does in fact cause disease by itself in these small pigs.

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