Evaluation of mortality causes in swine females in intensive production system

• Grant number: 19/17683-0
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): November 01, 2019
• Effective date (End): October 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Veterinary Medicine - Preventive Veterinary Medicine
• Principal Investigator: Andrea Micke Moreno
• Grantee: Matheus Saliba Monteiro
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária e Zootecnia (FMVZ). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the last decades it was observed a large genetic improvement in swine females' selection, fact associated with the intensification of the production system resulting in the improvement of pig industry productivity. Despite the increase in productivity has been expressive, the mortality rate in sows has increased becoming a new critic point of the production for the swine herds, due the sow mortality increases, economic loss including replacement costs and opportunity costs. The intensification of the production system associated with the size of the herd seems to negatively affect sows mortality. Although the sow mortality has been growing in several countries, there are few studies in relation to spontaneous deaths in large intensive production systems and the microbiological isolation and identification of the main agents involved in sows mortality. Therefore the present study aims to perform necropsy and annotation of zootechnical data from a herd with of a group of sows that presents spontaneous death from a herd containing 18000 sows in a farrow-to-finish system. From these animals will be collected samples from different systems (cardiorespiratory, genitourinary and gastrointestinal) to determine the cause of death according with macroscopy lesion until reaching 100 cases. It will be done the microbiological examination of the collected materials and the bacteria isolated will be identified using mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF), moreover, it will be realized PCR to detect the main respiratory and enteric agents. It will be also evaluated the association between zootechnical data, identified lesions at necropsy, microbiological isolation and agent identification, to look for correlations among these data and the causes of sow mortality in the herd. (AU)