December 21, 2021
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All types of supplies and equipment enter a hog farm every week, putting an operation at risk of a disease outbreak. But improved biosecurity protocols with multiple layers help ensure items entering a farm are fully disinfected, reported Erin Kettelkamp, DVM, Swine Vet Center, St. Peter, Minnesota.
Some supplies are at greater risk than others. New supplies coming directly from warehouses probably won’t have a big risk of introducing pathogens. But if there’s cross contamination with other supplies or equipment traveling from other farms or housed at different warehouses within a system, she explained, it can be a cause for concern.
Kettelkamp detailed some of the updated biosecurity protocols for supply and equipment entry onto a farm.
Disinfecting supplies
Time with temperature is a simple way to disinfect items that are bulky or difficult to disinfect. Place the items in a segregated space and heat it to 100° F for 24 to 48 hours for removal of pathogens, she said.
Different fogging-type disinfectants may also work if a fumigation room is available. In addition, she said items can always be sprayed down or hand-wiped with disinfectant.
Maintenance tools shared with other farms in a system pose a much greater risk than new supplies entering a farm. “If tools have come from another sow farm or other swine operation, we know there’s been contact, and those items pose a risk, especially if there are pathogens associated with it,” Kettelkamp said.
She suggested a layered disinfection approach where a producer could utilize both time/temperature and disinfection, such as utilizing a fogging practice and layering that with spraying those items down.
Fogging practices
Kettelkamp spent some time during her veterinary studies at the University of Illinois looking at fogging practices. Originally, she said, foggers weren’t very effective because producers didn’t realize the fogged disinfectants weren’t permeating the room and acting like a true fog to disinfect the items in the fumigation room.
“Items were getting stacked close together where the droplets couldn’t reach,” she explained. “The droplets were just rising and falling, like you hand-sprayed them, so the bottoms weren’t getting contacted. There was shadowing. Sometimes we forgot to put disinfectant in the fogger, so that was a big hiccup and obviously that doesn’t work.”
In her university work, she searched for what could be done to make these systems work better. She identified a dry-fog system from human medicine that distributes the disinfectant using a very small particle size. A traditional fogger used more of a fine mist.
However, a true dry-fog system isn’t currently available commercially to swine farms because of durability and ease of use. “Hopefully, we’ll develop that technology so it is more readily available on farm,” she added.
In the meantime, Hurricane foggers, operated at the lowest flow rate with a hydrogen peroxide/paracetic acid blend, can provide a 90% efficacy rate for disinfection.
Auditing biosecurity
People are creatures of habit, Kettelkamp said, so how can bad habits be broken or good habits be reinforced so good biosecurity practices are maintained? Even if there is a procedure list in place, it’s always good to have a third party or another person from the farm come in and check to make sure the staff is following these practices, she recommended.
As far as shoring up biosecurity, Kettelkamp said it depends on the farm. Overall sanitation is very important and should not just be something that is talked about maybe once a month or whenever the veterinarian visits.
“[Biosecurity] needs to be a true culture to keep everything in order, and that stems from the office into the hallways, and exudes out into how clean we keep the farm in general and protecting it from all sorts of biosecurity risks,” she added. “It’s also making sure our barns are up to date and making sure our loadout chutes are getting clean and all of those things.”