SHIC Examines Tongue Tips as a Novel Diagnostic Tool
The Swine Health Information Center is exploring the science behind the use of tongue tips as a diagnostic tool for identifying viral diseases
by Bruce Cochrane – Farmscape.ca
The Swine Health Information Center is evaluating submissions from a now closed request for research proposals to investigate tongue tips as a novel diagnostic sample type.
SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says tongue tips are a muscle tissue that can be readily harvested from mummies or aborted fetuses and are available with any type of mortality.
“If we can use these tissues that are readily available and readily harvested from neonate as well as pre and postweaning mortalities, we may be able to learn more about the spread of different viruses”“There’s an opportunity to look at the transmission of disease, especially viruses, both vertically as well as horizontally.
“By vertically I mean from the sow, the pregnant sow that may have aborted fetuses or may have mummifications that resulted from an infection that the pregnant sow got. That’s a vertically transmission.
“It goes from the sow to the neonates, to the small pigs vertically. This gives us an opportunity to understand the health status of the sow and how that correlates to the diagnostics and the pathogens that we find in the mummified fetuses and in the aborted fetuses so that’s an opportunity to look at vertical transmission.
“It’s also an opportunity to look at horizontal transmission or transmission from one pig to another.
“If we can use these tissues that are readily available and readily harvested from neonate as well as pre and postweaning mortalities, we may be able to learn more about the spread of different viruses among those populations.
“I think it’s got a unique opportunity to help us in both areas, both the area of the transmission of the virus from the dam to the fetus as well as the transmission of viruses among pens of pigs.“
Dr. Sundberg says tongue tips are already being submitted to diagnostic labs.
He says this work will and generate the data that will allow producers to have confidence in the diagnostic results they provide.
Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers
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