The Rural Voice, 1983-11, Page 13a.r l_rli :te.7. . +i111 T�1�1 al- -17111.1 aTi1 __171_1 -
to fur -bearing animals like mink and
silver foxes.
Over the past seven years, the lab
has become almost synonymous with
swine diseases. Sanford displays a
graph of the number of pig carcasses
handled over the past decade which il-
lustrates the point. The lab now sees
almost 1000 per cent more pig car-
casses than it did a decade ago. This
means the veterinarians are perform-
ing 1700 to 1900 pig autopsies annual-
ly.
A few weeks after he first arrived at
Huron Park, Sanford "tripped on"
the fact cataracts were showing up in
the eyes of sows, up to 31/2 years old,
caused by the feed additive
Hygromix. After a year, Sanford
realized the cataracts appeared after
producers fed the mix to their sows
continuously, rather than following
the eight-week on, eight-week off
schedule recommended by the
manufacturer.
The next disease his name is often
linked with is haemophilus pleuro-
pneumonia, a problem in the Scan-
dinavian countries in the late 1960s.
The disease surfaced suddenly in the
Huron Park area in 1978 - just at a
time when many producers were ex-
panding their operations.
Pleuro -pneumonia, says Sanford
"can riddle an entire herd", killing
the hogs rapidly in the post -weaning
to finishing stage, wiping out up to 50
per cent of a herd.
While Sanford and his colleagues
didn't produce an instant cure for the
disease, they pinned down that it was
spread by the pigs themselves and not
by trucks, rats in the barn or on
farmers' clothing. Instead, the
disease seemed to occur most in herds
where producers were buying stock
from different sources - proving a
particular hazard in sales barns.
"In areas where there are a lot of
pigs, the bug is there and something
different about the management
system causes it to explode," notes
the pathologist.
At the height of the epidemic,
which peaked in 1979, the lab was
seeing 400 carcasses a year. Now that
number has dropped back to 150 to
200 a year. Sanford says both farmers
and veterinarians have learned to
recognize the disease and act quickly
treating it with available antibiotics
and vaccines.
Haemophilis pleuro -pneumonia is
now in endemic or manageable levels
in southwestern Ontario, but because
it might explode again, at any time, in
any swine -producing area, it's still
one of the most popular topics San -
ford's invited to lecture about.
Another of the pathologist's pet
diseases is outlined in an article Dr.
Sanford wrote for the California
Veterinary Association's journal.
Coccidiosis, a diarrhea which left
piglets dehabilitated and runty started
showing up in local herds in 1979.
Future litters housed in the same pen
soon showed the same symptoms, so
from a producer's viewpoint, the
disease "becomes a continually
worsening scenario."
While saying sometimes "I'm good
at finding the diseases - but not
always the solutions," Sanford says
coccidiosis was a known problem in
chicken flocks, since the World War
II era. Since several drugs existed for
treating that coccidiosis,
veterinarians have been using those
drugs to provide some measure of
disease control for swine, until a
licensed swine coccidiosis drug is on
the market.
Aside from medication, the best
method of gaining control over the
disease is sanitation - in other words,
prevention is good, old "elbow
grease" in Dr. Sanford's words.
Since baby pigs eat their own feces,
and that's the way the disease
spreads, piglets can be contaminated
even in slatted floor barns if floors
haven't been hosed down and slats
thoroughly cleaned out.
Sanford, however, is the first to ad-
mit cleanliness isn't the whole story
since the disease "still happens in
very clean pens." The number of
cases is still increasing yearly, with
outbreaks most common in June,
August and September. While coc-
cidiosis appears in all sizes of opera-
tions, the pathologist says outbreaks
are definitely more frequent in
medium and larger operations.
Another disease diagnosed at the
lab is Strep -suis -type II, long
associated with British and Scandina-
vian swine herds, which causes a form
of meningitis or inflammation of the
brain.
Three years ago, the laboratory
staff first noted a phenomenon Dr.
Sanford calls "fading piglet" syn-
drome.
A litter of newly -born piglets
would appear healthy and robust un-
til about 12 to 36 hours after birth,
when one or more members of the lit-
ter would stop nursing, and within a
short time, go off from the others to
die.
About the same time Huron Park
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THE RURAL VOICE, NOVEMBER 1983 PG. 11