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Quiet on the PEDv front

A livestock market analyst says although he anticipated more problems with PEDv compared to a year ago, there haven’t been many issues so far.

Steve Meyer with Express Markets tells Brownfield the fear of another outbreak stems from less sow farms with immunity to the virus.

“We kind of expected the worst…I would say it hasn’t been yet.”

While there haven’t been any big outbreaks of PEDv, Meyer says a University of Minnesota monitoring project has confirmed a few cases.

“They picked up a few sow farms in their large sample that represents about 40 percent of the U.S. breeding herd; they had a bit of an uptick (of the virus) back in November.  But the number of sow farms breaking with PEDv has dropped back down to just one or two the last few weeks.”

Meyer says there have also been isolated reports of the PRRS virus recently, but nothing more than normal for this time of year.