PEOPLE ▶▶▶


Wageningen UR The executive board of Wa- geningen University & Re- search (WUR) has appointed Professor Bas Rodenburg as professor. The chair re- cently came into effect and is funded by Utrecht University, where Rodenburg is profes- sor of Animal Welfare. The appointment is for one day per week. The board also appointed Dr Jeroen Dijk man as managing director of the Animal Sciences Group. The ap- pointment comes into effect on 1 September 2020.


Borregaard Borregaard added David Hines to its Americas feed addi- tives team from 20 April 2020. He has taken on the role as technical sales manager for the Southwestern US.


Sanluc


Belgium-based feed addi- tives company Sanluc Inter- national recently welcomed Dr Noémie Van Noten. She will be the company’s new R&D manager.


Fancom From 1 July 2020, Simon Haazen has been working at Fancom as an area sales manager. In this role, he will be re- sponsible for sales and commercial support for customers in Scandinavia and the Baltic region.


Nutreco Nutreco announced a num- ber of changes in its Execu- tive Committee. Harm de Wildt, Nutreco Chief Oper- ating Officer and CEO Trouw Nutrition, will retire from the company. His role will be taken over by Saskia Korink (pictured), currently innovation director at Trouw Nutrition. Her successor will be announced in due course. Nutreco’s Chief Innovation Officer Viggo Halseth announced he will step down from the committee.


UFAC-UK


UK nutritional supplement manufacturer and supplier to the animal feed industry, UFAC-UK has appointed James Hastings-Molyneux as area business manager. He will be covering an area encompassing the UK’s Midlands and South East as well as Ireland.


28 ▶PIG PROGRESS | Volume 36, No. 6, 2020 Research into Minnesota water quality


Because some Minnesota pork pro- ducers have recently observed subop- timal performance of nursery pigs and suspected it may be due to poor water quality, a University of Minnesota re- search team looked into it. Professor Lee Johnston and his colleagues first determined the range of water quality received by nursery pigs in almost 50 barns across Minnesota through an online survey. They then did water testing at 15 select barns. The next step was to create three water treat- ments: • one to represent good quality (very low in sulfates, total dissolved solids, calcium, etc.);


• one of poorer quality (higher con- centrations of these materials); and


• one of quite poor quality (even higher concentrations).


The three treatments were given ran- domly to groups of weanling pigs on one commercial farm in Minnesota over 40 days, but across the treatments no differences in pig growth perfor- mance or health status were found. This seems to show that nursery pigs can adapt to drinking water with a wide range of characteristics. However, the researchers noted that in a commercial setting, cleanliness and maintenance of the water distribution system can influence the quality of wa- ter delivered to pigs, and the health status of the piglets is just one of the factors that can impact on their re- sponses to the water they are given.


China: Swine flu makes headlines


News from China about an influenza strain in pigs made headlines all over the world in late June. The strain, called G4 EA H1N1, and present in pigs in China since 2016, was observed to be capable of jumping to humans. Al- though human-to-human transmission was not proven, the virus was de- scribed as having “all the essential hall- marks of a candidate pandemic virus”. The word “pandemic” was picked up quickly by, for example, the BBC, CNN


and Fox News. The article was written by scientists attached to various institutes and universities around China, and it appeared in the Proceed- ings of the National Academy of Scienc- es. The authors wrote that in tests, 10.4% of swine workers had tested positive for the virus – or 35 out of 338 tested people. Experts worldwide responded, however, that it is not uncommon for flu viruses to be transferred to humans.


PHOTO: NUTRECO


PHOTO: SANLUC


PHOTO: HERBERT WIGGERMAN


PHOTO: DYLAN VANBOXTEL


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