SHIC-Funded Study Examines Piglet Postmortem Sampling for PRRS Detection

With a goal to provide welfare-friendly and cost-effective methods for active PRRSV surveillance, Drs. Cesar Corzo, Mariana Kikuti and colleagues from the University of Minnesota led a study to evaluate the accuracy of different postmortem specimens collected from piglets in breeding herds for disease detection. Funded by the Swine Health Information Center, the study focused on the sensitivity of PRRSV detection by PCR across six sample types, including nasal, oral, and rectal swabs, tongue-tip fluids, superficial inguinal lymph nodes, and intracardiac blood. Overall, investigators concluded that oral swabs and lymph nodes showed the best diagnostic performance. Tongue-tip fluids had high sensitivity (92.2%) but low specificity (53.9%) due to likely environmental contamination and may be a less suitable sample type for individual pig diagnosis. Published by mdpi.com, you can find the entire piglet postmortem sampling study here, including citations for content included in this summar