Farmscape for April 28, 2021

A fact sheet, issued by the Swine Health Information Center, offers pork producers and veterinarians the latest information on Streptococcus zooepidemicus.
Streptococcus zooepidemicus, a common bacteria that in rare cases results in the sudden death of pigs, was identified in Canada in 2019 and has since been found in several U.S. states, including outbreaks in 2019 in Ohio and Tennessee and in January of this year in Indiana.
Dr. Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center, says a newly developed fact sheet summarizes the infection, how it's transmitted, how it can be controlled and how it can be cleaned up.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
We wanted to make sure that we had the best information out in front of people that we could provide when they're presented with a Strep zoo isolate.
It very well may be that veterinarians and producers could have a case that they send into the diagnostic lab and the lab report comes back as Step zoo and  there'll be a lot of questions about what does this mean, what does this bacteria do, how does it work, what's the pathogenicity, what's the control, what's the opportunity for transmission, all of those things.
We've put them together into a fact sheet similar to what we’ve done for the viruses that's in our viral disease matrix, our viral disease list.
We had a panel of bacteriologists review the history and the makeup of Strep zoo and they scored it and inserted it into the bacterial list and then they helped develop a fact sheet about it.
It's probably not something you're going to run to say "wow I need to read about this" but it's there for when you need it.
That's really the objective of the fact sheet, to make sure that we've got information about these potentially emerging pathogens in pigs that's available for producers and veterinarians to help understand their epidemiology so we can respond quickly should they be identified.

The fact sheet can be accessed at swinehealth.org.
For more visit Farmscape.Ca.
Bruce Cochrane.

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