Study reveals how truck rerouting can help prevent farm-to-farm spread of disease

North Carolina State University completed a new study to help prevent the spread of animal diseases between swine farms when transporting feed and livestock.

The study modeled a new routing system for the trucks that travel between pig farms and from farms to market. According to the report, even without effective truck cleaning and disinfection (C&D), the rerouting system reduced up to 42% of the contacts between infected and uninfected farms via vehicle movements.

Published in Preventive Veterinary Medicine and supported by the Swine Health Information Center, the study examined the role of contaminated vehicles and the effectiveness of preventive strategies, such as C&D, in spreading infectious diseases among commercial swine farms under field conditions.

In their abstract, authors Jason Galvis from NC State and Cesar Corzo of the University of Minnesota St. Paul noted that this area of study remains largely unexplored.

The research team pulled data from 1,609 commercial swine farms, which included the number of animals and GPS data from the trucks traveling between farms, as well as data from enhanced on-farm Secure Pork Supply (SPS) biosecurity plans hosted in the Rapid Access Biosecurity (RAB) app — a national initiative aimed at preventing the spread of pathogens between pig farms.

“Currently, vehicles used to transport feed or pigs are dispatched from a call center and based on weekly schedules,” explained Gustavo Machado, assistant professor of population health and pathobiology at NC State and corresponding author of the work. “But we wanted to see if changing the way that trucks are routed between farms could be a good way to prevent the spread of diseases that are extremely costly to farmers, such as porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) and porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome virus (PRRSV).”

Through data gathered, researchers were able to determine which farms had a disease outbreak as well as when vehicles were traveling to C&D stations.