African Swine Fever in Europe Unmistakenly, African Swine Fever (ASF) was also on the menu, as the lethal viral disease is slowly making its way west in Europe in wild boar herds, occasionally hitting backyard production facilities as well. Dr Klaus Depner of the Friedrich- Loeffler-Institut, Germany, gave a clear introduction to the viral disease – what disease it is and how it spreads. Dr Depner’s main message for swine producers was the fol- lowing: “Biosecurity shortcomings were the overall common finding and the most serious factor responsible for virus in- troduction in domestic pig holdings. Therefore, farm biosecu- rity has to be addressed more rigorously, particularly all as- pects related to human activities. Information campaigns with all stakeholders (farmers, veterinarians and staff) are a vital issue.”


News on ASF vaccine development Next on stage was Dr Fernando Rodríguez, on behalf of the Spanish research institute CReSA-IRTA. He has been spending a long time trying to develop a vaccine for ASF and he spent some time to explain that that in itself is not an easy task. The virus encodes more than 150 proteins, he said, which makes it rather difficult to develop a vaccine. There is reason to be optimistic, he said: “On one hand, sever- al live attenuated vaccine prototypes have been successfully tested in experimental conditions and on the other hand, new expectations have been opened regarding the potential use of safe and efficient subunit vaccines in the near future.”


Biosecurity and better health Another pig health celebrity, Prof Dominiek Maes, Ghent University, Belgium, also took to the stage. The university has been working on biosecurity issues for a long time and devel- oped an anonymous web-based survey for swine producers (in English) where they can test their level of internal and external biosecurity. The tool will provide producers with a score between 0 and 100, ranging from a complete absence of biosecurity measures to a full presence of biosecurity measures. Prof Maes described that already about 5,000 farms in 40 countries worldwide have used the tool to help them increase biosecurity. Prof Maes said that an evaluation of the online biosecurity tool showed that it can serve as an instrument to evaluate improvement strategies.


Smallholders: A risk in Australia Biosecurity, but then from a different angle, was the key topic of the keynote by Marta Hernández-Jover, from Charles Sturt University in Australia. She introduced the term ‘smallholders’, in Australia the word for ‘backyard farms’ and explained that they form in fact a threat to biosecurity for professional swine farms, due to e.g. a lack of prior agricultural knowledge, limit- ed veterinary contact and a diverse cultural background, to name a few. She identified key social and institutional factors to consider for improving engagement of producers with biosecurity.


▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 34, No. 5, 2018 25


In discussion: Prof Derald Holtkamp (right), Iowa State University.


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