INTERVIEW ▶▶▶ Jeroen Dewulf


“BioCheck makes biosecurity measurable”


Jeroen Dewulf, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Ghent University, Belgium, is known as a worldwide authority in the field of pathogen prevention. Measuring biosecurity is a challenge he addresses. He says, “The challenge of preventive health care has always been that, contrary to curative health care, one doesn’t see any tangible results.”


T BY KEES VAN DOOREN, REPORTER, BOERDERIJ


he Flemish professor Jeroen Dewulf is predominantly ac- tive in the field of preventive animal health. In that context the main idea is to prevent that animals get ill or that dis- eases will spread on farms or between farms. In other


words: biosecurity. Not exactly a novel theme, but one that has been receiving more attention than ever before lately. One of the reasons is because supplying antibiotics without giving it any fur- ther thought is a risky business. Secondly, swine production in large parts of the world is being jeopardised by African Swine Fever (ASF). Biosecurity is an important tool to get a grip on antibiotics usage and to keep pig houses free from animal diseases. About the ac- tivities at Ghent University’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Prof Dewulf says, “Contrary to veterinarians, we do not look at individ- ual animals, but rather we consider things at farm or population levels. In the long term, we have to aim for a livestock industry in which antibiotics are barely needed, from birth until slaughter. Antibiotics have to be typically applied in curative use only.” To offer tools to pig producers worldwide to produce healthier an- imals, Ghent University developed the so-called BioCheck meth- od. This is a risk-based scoring system providing insight in biose- curity levels on farms and makes them measurable. Dewulf is also a co-author of the book Biosecurity in Animal Production and Veterinary Medicine.


Pig Progress: Biosecurity should be well known to everyone these days. Is the book still relevant? Prof Jeroen Dewulf: “Oh yes, for sure. It isn’t exactly a book in the


Harry Potter series, but there is a continuous demand for this book. Recently it was also translated into Chinese. It is the first book in which all components about biosecurity have been com- bined and address many issues at a detailed level, think of e.g. the correct cleaning and disinfecting of pig houses or the ideal work- ing lines in a pig house. Many veterinarians are not completely aware of these type of issues either. They usually have a lot of knowledge in the field of diagnostics, curative veterinary medi- cine or vaccine usage, but not so much in the field of preventive animal health. It is well known that in livestock production a lot of mistakes are being made with regard to biosecurity. That mainly applies to African and Asian countries. There are, however, also major mistakes being made in Europe. So all in all, there is a long way to go before animals grow up healthily all around the globe without the structural usage of antibiotics. In some parts of the world, including the United States, antibiotics are still structurally included in feed as a growth promoter.”


Still, you speak of an animal husbandry without structural usage of antibiotics. Within which timeframe will that be possible, do you think? “I think that this will be possible in the next 20 to 30 years. I have noticed that everywhere in the world there is a development go- ing – or is at least being started up – towards a livestock industry aiming to use fewer antibiotics and even in the long term would like to get rid of group treatment. North West Europe in this re- spect is leading this development. In that part of the world there are already clusters of farms producing entirely without antibiot- ics usage. However, this also exists in the USA. In addition, from


▶PIG PROGRESS | Volume 36, No. 2, 2020 15


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