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

A Canadian case-control study investigating factors associated with mortality due to porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV2) found that nursery rations were more likely to contain SDP in control herds compared with clinically affected case herds (Dewey et al., 2006) ; however, alternatively the observed differences may be completely unrelated to the SDP inclusion in the diets. In addition, the biological neutralization activity of antibodies against common pig pathogens present in SDP was conserved and may contribute to the biosafety of commercially available SDP (Polo et al., 2013) . Previously, it has also been shown that SDP has an intrinsic effect reducing survival of PEDV under in vitro conditions (Quist-Rybachuk et al., 2015) . After the introduction of PEDV into the United States, concerns on possible contribution of porcine-based SDP in rapid farm-to-farm transmission were raised (Pasick et al., 2014) despite studies clearly demonstrating that PEDV is inactivated during the spray-drying process (Opriessnig et al., 2014; Pujols and Segales, 2014; Gerber et al., 2014b) . To eliminate any possible risk of pig pathogen spread via SDP while retaining its benefits as part of a pig diet, pork producers may switch from porcine-origin SDP toward bovine-origin SDP (BovSDP). The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is any benefit of adding BovSDP to a diet of pigs during acute PEDV infection.