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Biography:

Dr Llopart joined Hipra in 1992 and became a member of the Veterinarian Pig Technical Service Department.

Throughout Hipra he had the excellent opportunity to travel worldwide in all the continents, trying to assess producers as much as he could, but more importantly to understand different production systems and disease scenarios which helped very much to develop his knowledge as a pig vet.

Recently, since last year, he’s coordinating the team of vets belonging to Pig Business Unit (encharged of both Marketing and Technical Pig Department of Hipra).

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Abstract:

Title: "Understanding infections’ dynamics to control PRDC problematic farms"

Porcine Respiratory Disease Complex (PRDC) is of major concern in industrial pig farming since is still responsible for major productive losses in many farms worldwide. As a complex, 2 main components are playing a very important role on the expression of the PRDC. One component is what we could call the "environmental component", which refers to the ventilation, housing, temperature, management, stock density, genetics, immunological status of the host, feeding system, etc. and the other component is what we could call the "pathogenic component", which refers tot the different virus or bacteria involved. About the "pathogenic component" of the complex, Porcine Respiratory and Reproductive Virus (PRRSV) and Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae (Mhyo) has been demonstrated to play a major role on the PRDC, in combination with other viruses (Swine Influenza virus (SIV), Aujeszky’s Disease virus (ADV) or bacteria (Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae, Haemophilus parasuis, Pasteurella multocida, etc). However, the expression of the disease into a farm is a balanced situation between these two components.

Even though two farms could present similar "pathogenic component" (infected with the same pathogens) and also similar "environmental component"(same genetic, same feeding, same technical management), the mortality between the two farms could be drastically different. One of the main reasons for such differences is due to the infections dynamics curve of each one of the pathogens infecting the two farms are different, and therefore, the co-infection periods between pathogens also keeps changing. The infection dynamic curve of a given pathogen keeps changing throughout the time, being necessary to monitor it at least once a year to check the evolution. Therefore, the use of serology, and particularly, the use of herd-profiles (serumprofiles or PCR-profiles) in PRDC problematic farms has became an very useful tool to monitor the dynamic of infection of each one of the pathogens involved and to evaluate the dynamics of co-infections between pathogens.

In this presentation, the practical case exposed, consists on a longitudinal herd-profile and PRC-profile carried out in a 4000 sow farrow-to-finish farm with high mortalities in their post-weaning and fattening units. Results showed the different dynamic of infection for each pathogen. However, knowing the dynamics of infection of each pathogen was not enough to decide what strategy had to be implemented to improve mortality in this particular farm. What it works in a farm, not necessarily have to work in another farm to reduce mortality. It was necessary to study the dynamic of co-infections between pathogens by using a Co-infection Dynamic Table. Evaluating what co-infections were overlapping along the live of the pigs during nursery and fattening period, became much easier to understand which pathogens were directly involved with the mortality, becoming easier to decide what technical actions had to be implemented first in the farm.