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Feed still in question in PEDV

The question of whether the PED virus can be spread through hog feed is still unanswered, according to Dr. Paul Sundberg with the National Pork Board. He says recent studies in Canada don’t dismiss the feed question.

The Canadian government tested spray-dried blood plasma that was used in feed fed to the first Canadian pigs that got sick. He says the plasma was then fed to test pigs and DID contain the live virus that caused those tested pigs to get sick. The feed pellets that contained the dried plasma – fed to test pigs – did NOT make tested pigs sick.  Sundberg says, “There’s probably a couple of different possibilities (for that). One could be the processing, the pelleting process, was a high enough temperature, enough pressure and temperature for long enough to kill the virus. You could still detect that it was there at some point but it wasn’t alive.”  He says the virus does not like high temperatures.

The other possibility, Sundberg tells Brownfield Ag News, is that not enough pigs were tested on the feed pellets for a long enough period of time, so they did not develop the disease. Additional research dollars approved by the National Pork Board at its recent meeting will go into continued PED/feed research and studies continue in Canada.