Canada has a high health status in relation to pig breeding and this is a competitive
\nadvantage in terms of being a world leader in the supply of pig genetics across the globe.\u00a0Although it is possible to maintain this status through strict biosecurity and isolation at the\u00a0top of the production pyramid, it soon breaks down at the commercial level. Instead, a\u00a0range of additional management measures are required including vaccination, and threesite\u00a0and all-in-all-out production. When disease occurs then one of the most important\u00a0impacts, in addition to the cost of treatment and mortality, is the cost of morbidity, or put\u00a0another way the impact on growth. This is an aspect that is sometimes overlooked as\u00a0people talk about disease resistance, and think of a bullet-proof animal, perhaps as a result\u00a0of the success of vaccination, rather than differences in levels of susceptibility. Although\u00a0there are some examples of genetic resistance to disease in pigs, in most cases this is not
\nachievable, instead we should focus on reducing the impact of disease when it occurs and\u00a0how genetics can impact this component of health.<\/p>\n
There are clear examples where it is possible to select\u00a0for resistance to a pathogen, such as E. coli F18, which is responsible for edema disease, a\u00a0significant problem in some regions. However, there are still very few examples where\u00a0genetics has been used to help improve pig health. One reason for this is the complexity of\u00a0the trait, in most cases animals are not resistant to a disease, instead they vary in their
\nsusceptibility to the disease agents. Another reason is the difficulty in adding a specific\u00a0disease trait into selection indices. In addition, although we now have the possibility of\u00a0adding genetics to our toolbox for health it is still difficult to demonstrate the potential of\u00a0the approach. The availability of new high throughput genomics tools provides the\u00a0opportunity to change this situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0Although it is possible to maintain this status through strict biosecurity and isolation at the\u00a0top of the production pyramid, it soon breaks down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,930],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pork-insight-articles","category-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19329"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19331,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329\/revisions\/19331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}