Category Archives: Foreign Animal Disease

An outbreak of Streptococcus equii zooepidemicus reported in the third quarter of 2022 in western Canada has demonstrated the value of African Swine Fever rule-out testing.

A recent symposium held at the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Disease at the University of Georgia, sponsored in part by the Swine Health Information Center, addressed issues surrounding a 2022 outbreak of Japanese encephalitis in Australia affecting humans and animals. Reacting to the JE occurrence, SHIC along with the US pork industry began monitoring Australia’s situation and response to the outbreak. SHIC immediately began encouraging prevention and preparedness activities as pigs are JEV amplifying hosts. One major objective of the symposium was to further JEV prevention, preparation and control for the US. As such, identifying animals other than domestic pigs that can serve as JEV hosts in North America was a major topic of discussion.

With no commercially available vaccine for African swine fever virus (ASFV), the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) recently awarded a $500,000 Rapid Outcomes from Agriculture Research (ROAR) grant to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a $150,000 to Kansas State University to develop safe and rapidly deployable vaccines for ASFV, to mitigate the spread and decrease fatalities in case of an outbreak. National Pork Board and MEDIAN Diagnostics provided matching funds for $1,000,000 and $300,000 total investments, respectively.

The 2022 Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) outbreak in Australia continues to be at the forefront of producers’ minds there and attract attention from around the world. As stakeholders in Australia assess what they know and what they are continuing to learn about the outbreak, international observers are addressing the potential for JEV to be discovered in currently naïve countries, bringing with it challenges to human and animal health. These topics, and others, were the focus of a recent symposium hosted by the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Disease at the University of Georgia, sponsored in part by the Swine Health Information Center. A total 156 people registered to attend the symposium (27 in-person and 129 virtual attendees) from Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, and across the US. Of those, 30 were persons with USDA-affiliated agencies.

As African swine fever (ASF) continues to spread throughout Asia and parts of Europe, we see firsthand the devastation it causes to swine populations.

ProMED, a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, published an article on September 22, 2022, reporting an undiagnosed swine disease in Ecuador. This report stated CSF has been ruled out in the Esmeraldas province after a disease alert was raised on September 7, 2022. No additional alerts have been issued.

In an article published on a Vietnamese agriculture news website during September 2022, positive ASF vaccination results and encouragement for stricter control were shared. Following a vaccination trial performed by the Vietnam Department of Animal Health on two farms with 258 pigs, officials said 20 localities have now deployed vaccinations with a total of more than 21,000 doses following all appropriate guidelines.

Why should the U.S. pork industry continue to pay attention to Japanese Encephalitis Virus (JEV) in Australia? “Because we learned the lesson from porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED),” Paul Sundberg, DVM, executive director of the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC), says bluntly.

On Friday, Canada’s Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, announced an investment of up to $45.3 million to enhance efforts to prevent African swine fever from entering Canada and prepare for a potential outbreak. The funding will be critical in reducing the risk of introduction and spread of ASF in Canada.

A new publication in the journal Transboundary and Emerging Diseases entitled “Stability of African swine fever virus in feed during environmental storage” details the length of time ASFV remains stable in feed at different storage temperatures. The robust study was conducted by a research team led by Dr. Megan Niederwerder, Associate Director of the Swine Health Information Center.