Impact of dietary spray-dried bovine plasma addition on pigs infected with porcine epidemic diarrhea virus

Duffy, Mark A; Chen, Qi; Zhang, Jianqiang; Halbur, Patrick G; Opriessnig, Tanja

In this study, the PEDV challenge was performed after an acclimation period of 1 wk to minimize stress from weaning and transport to the new facility. Successful PEDV challenge was confirmed by detecting PEDV RNA in fecal swabs. All pigs (100%) from the BovSDP-PEDV group shed PEDV in fecal samples from dpi 2 to 6, whereas between 25% and approximately 87% of the animals in PEDV group shed the virus during that time. These results highlight that a higher number of animals excreted PEDV during the early stages of infection in BovSDP-PEDV group. Differences in the challenge dose or challenge process can be ruled out. The PEDV inoculum was prepared in a similar manner and at the same time for both groups by a single person and stored on ice until challenge of each group. The challenge was conducted by the same personnel for both groups with approximately 20 min between the two groups. The obtained results could have been by chance due to the group sizes. Alternatively, the BovSDP-PEDV animals could be more prone to excrete PEDV in the early stages in the infection. Unlike in suckling pigs that are very susceptible to PEDV infection, only 2 per 13 PEDV-infected pigs (both from the PEDV challenged groups) had to be killed due to the severity of clinical signs. This is expected and comparable with other trials infecting 3-wk-old pigs (Crawford et al., 2015) .