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SOLVING HEALTH PROBLEMS WITH GENETICS
Posted in: Pork Insight Articles, Production by admin on May 11, 2017
Canada has a high health status in relation to pig breeding and this is a competitive
advantage in terms of being a world leader in the supply of pig genetics across the globe. Although it is possible to maintain this status through strict biosecurity and isolation at the top of the production pyramid, it soon breaks down at the commercial level. Instead, a range of additional management measures are required including vaccination, and threesite and all-in-all-out production. When disease occurs then one of the most important impacts, in addition to the cost of treatment and mortality, is the cost of morbidity, or put another way the impact on growth. This is an aspect that is sometimes overlooked as people talk about disease resistance, and think of a bullet-proof animal, perhaps as a result of the success of vaccination, rather than differences in levels of susceptibility. Although there are some examples of genetic resistance to disease in pigs, in most cases this is not
achievable, instead we should focus on reducing the impact of disease when it occurs and how genetics can impact this component of health.
There are clear examples where it is possible to select for resistance to a pathogen, such as E. coli F18, which is responsible for edema disease, a significant problem in some regions. However, there are still very few examples where genetics has been used to help improve pig health. One reason for this is the complexity of the trait, in most cases animals are not resistant to a disease, instead they vary in their
susceptibility to the disease agents. Another reason is the difficulty in adding a specific disease trait into selection indices. In addition, although we now have the possibility of adding genetics to our toolbox for health it is still difficult to demonstrate the potential of the approach. The availability of new high throughput genomics tools provides the opportunity to change this situation.