SwineHealth News for December 31, 2020

The Manager of the Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network is encouraging the public to avoid being caught up in the media hype when it comes to reporting on Coronavirus research.
In preparation for its quarterly conference calls with veterinarians, the Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network gathers information from around the world.
CWSHIN Manager Dr. Jette Christensen observes it seems researchers are scrutinizing everything they have on Coronaviruses so if they have any Coronavirus isolates in their freezers or they detect it in livestock they are looking more closely at it.

Clip-Dr. Jette Christensen-Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network:
They do more fingerprinting, they do more sequencing, more detailed tests on each Coronavirus they can get.
That's a good thing because we learn more about Coronavirus but it also means that media are more likely to pick up stories when these researchers publish their results, even if there's a negligible potential health threat to either humans or animals.
We had an example of that recently when a group of researchers published that a swine acute diarrhea virus, that is a Coronavirus, could actually grow in human cells in the laboratory.
We're not talking about spread among people.
This diarrhea is closely related to PED.
It's a Coronavirus but it causes diarrhea not flulike symptoms that we see in humans with COVID now.
This finding is not uncommon but it reaches the media and causes some discussion.
What we need to be careful about is that it doesn't necessarily mean that there's more threat to humans it doesn’t necessarily mean that there's more threat to animals, to pigs than there used to be.
It's just that we're looking more.

Dr. Christensen says there's no reason to be overly concerned, even if there's more reports of different types of Coronaviruses from around the world.
For more visit Farmscape.Ca.
Bruce Cochrane.

*SwineHealth News is produced in association with Farmscape.Ca and is a presentation of Wonderworks Canada Inc.