Feed Sourced From FMD Free Regions Poses Minimal Risk to North American Livestock
The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center says, by sourcing feed ingredients from foreign animal disease free regions, the risk of importing these infections in feed is minimal
by Bruce Cochrane – FarmScape Online
In partnership with the Swine Health Information Center, Pipestone Applied Research conducted a demonstration project this spring to confirm, under real world conditions, the survivability of disease causing pathogens in feed.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says the demonstration mimicked what had happened in the laboratory, showing that viruses survive the longest in high protein products like soybean meal but were limited in their survival in vitamins and amino acid ingredients.
“If ingredients are sourced from areas free of African Swine Fever, Foot and Mouth Disease or Classical Swine Fever, there’s very little risk”
“The thing that we tried to do was try to get an idea about those that are endemic within the United States and apply those to the common feed ingredients.“We did use things like soybean meals, vitamins, amino acid ingredients, those types of things.
“We used the Seneca Valley Virus, PED, PRRS, those viruses that are endemic here so we didn’t use any viruses that were outside of the norm.
“We didn’t use African Swine Fever or those types of things because we couldn’t do that and we didn’t want to take a chance on doing such a thing.
“But we wanted to understand the survivability of the endemic viruses in these feed ingredients.
“We used Seneca Valley Virus because it is in the same family as Food and Mouth Disease so we think that it gives a pretty good indication of the way that Foot and Mouth Disease Virus would perform under similar conditions.”
Dr. Sundberg encourages producers to talk to their feed suppliers about their source of feed ingredients and mitigations to avoid contamination.
He says, if ingredients are sourced from areas free of African Swine Fever, Foot and Mouth Disease or Classical Swine Fever, there’s very little risk, if any, that they’d import those viruses in feed.
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