Farmscape for January 5, 2012   (Episode 4044)

AcuShot Needle-Free reports concerns over the potential spread of PRRS within swine herds is fueling an increased interest in needle-free injection technology.

Needle-free injection uses pressure to drive veterinary compounds through the skin of animals replacing the need for needles.

In the U.S. Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome has become such a concern that swine operations are vaccinating entire breeding herds to minimize the threat of PRRS.

AcuShot Regional Marketing and Technical Support Manager Mike Agar says one South Carolina operation he's worked with would have had to use a fresh needle for each sow to avoid the risk of PRRS cross contamination but switching to needle-free eliminated that expense.

Clip-Mike Agar-AcuShot Needle-Free:
You're physically not taking a needle from one animal and pushing it into another so you're not taking bodily fluids and biological material from one animal to the next.

You're just surface contact with needle-free versus a puncture so we're not moving from animal to animal with cross contaminants so we can go from animal to animal with the same device with a mass reservoir of vaccination and inoculate thousand of animals.

To put it in perspective, over two days, we vaccinated 84 hundred sows in less than six hours total time.

That's a significant labor and time saving not to mention the actual cost of the needles.

The needles would have cost somewhere between 19 and 30 cents a piece and then you have to deal with those sharps on proper disposal from an ethical standpoint and that's stuff they didn't have to do.

In the one day I figured just on needle cost we saved them between 800 and one thousand dollars, let alone labor, time and cross contamination possible potential.

Agar notes needle-free injection is also much less stressful on the animal and therefor less stressful for those who administer the injections.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council