Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome prevalence and processing fluids use for diagnosis in United States breeding herds

Introduction: Processing fluids have been recently adopted by the U.S. swine industry as a breeding herd PRRS monitoring tool due to their increased representativeness of animals within the herd. Here, we use the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project (MSHMP) database, representative of similar to 50% of the U.S. swine breeding herd, to describe processing fluids submissions for PRRS diagnosis and their relation to PRRS prevalence and time to stability over time between 2009 and 2020. Methods: An ecological time series Poisson regression modeling the number of status 1 farms and weekly percentage of processing fluids submissions for PRRS diagnosis was done. Time to stability was calculated for sites that detected a PRRS outbreak within the study period and modeled through a proportional hazards mixed effect survival model using production system as a random-effect factor and epiweek as a panel variable. Results: Processing fluids diagnosis submissions increased starting in 2017. The difference between each year's highest and lowest weekly prevalence averaged 10.9% between 2009 and 2017, whereas it averaged 5.0% in 2018-2020 period. Each year's lowest weekly prevalence ranged from 11.3 to 19.5% in 2009-2017 and from 22.4 to 29.2% in 2018-2020. We also detected an increasing proportion of breeding sites that did not reach stability within 1 year of reporting an outbreak (chi-square for trend p < 0.0001). The total time to stability was not associated with the region of the country in which the site was located, the site's air filtration status, its PRRS status before the outbreak, or the different statuses a site achieved to be classified as stable, when accounting for the production system in the multivariate model. However, a higher proportion of system-wide processing fluids use was associated with increased time to stability. Discussion: Altogether, the temporal concurrence of processing fluids used for PRRS virus monitoring suggests that the adoption of this sampling strategy may help explain the changes observed in PRRS status 1 prevalence since 2018, although further studies are still needed.

Automated summary

This study used the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project database to analyze the submission of processing fluids for PRRS diagnosis in swine farms from 2009 to 2020. The study found an increasing trend in the use of processing fluids for diagnosis since 2017, and it also found that a higher proportion of processing fluids use was associated with increased time to stability. This suggests that the adoption of processing fluids as a monitoring tool may help explain the changes observed in PRRS prevalence.