1. Maria Costa PhD Walsh Fellow at Teagasc Moorepark
IPHS Symposium 2016
12th of April
National Biosecurity: A look into the best practices of biosecurity in other countries and recommendations for the Republic of Ireland
Maria Costa
PhD Walsh Fellow at Teagasc Moorepark

2. Why Biosecurity? Environment Diseases Performance Productivity …
Trade/Market …
Biosecurity is defined has the set of practices that limits the entry, persistence and spread of diseases within a contry/region or farm.
Just by looking at the raw definition, we can estimate the broad impact biosecurity can have in a pig farm.
The environment (manure, pollution), the diseases (pig diseases, zoonotic diseases, the ones that can the spread from animals to humans), the performance (diseased animals don’t put on weight so easily) and therefore the productivity of the whole farm is affected.
Ultimately, it has an impact on the trade of the pigs once pigs with a low health status are hardly bought by other farms and they might face other challenges if/when sold to slaughter.

3. Goals Assess Ireland’s biosecurity Comments and suggestions
What do other countries do?
Comments and suggestions
In this work, the goals proposed were to assess Ireland’s biosecurity, to discover what do they do in other countries and, finally, to comment and to suggest improvements to be made in irish pig farms.
The first 2 goals are strictly related to each other as for assessing Ireland’s biosecurity, one has to find out how it is done elsewhere.

4. What do other countries do?
Belgium
France
Germany
Sweden
Denmark
There are some biosecurity protocols described in literature. Biocheck.ugent was developed in Belgium, such as Merel had the opportunity to explain before, and has been used by several European countries.
There are other Biosecurity protocols described but most of them were created to assess problems related to a specific disease such as PRRS, for example. Biocheck.ugent, on the other hand, it’s a comprehensive questionnaire, covering a wide variety of topics affecting pig farms. We already have available results from Biosecurity assessments made in Belgium, France, Germany and Sweden in the framework of the project MINAPIG, which Merel has just described. Those are the results are are going to compare Ireland with today.
Denmark has also recently made public it’s biosecurity assessment through a conference poster last March but the results are not published yet.
Biocheck is reported to be used in individual farms from several other countries but the figures are not representative from those countries.
Teagasc and the Central Veterinary research laboratory, in a joint effort to understand and tackle respiratory diseases in pig farms have put into practice a plan to assess Irish pig farms’ biosecurity. This plan includes the use of the Biocheck.ugent to take advantage of the available results from other countries.
This questionnaire is composed by a set of questions prepared to assess 2 main groups: external biosecurity (which prevents the entrance of disease in countries/farms) and internal biosecurity (which prevents the persistence and spread of diseases within the countries/farm). It can be made in an 1h time by interviewing or visiting farms and farmers.
Postma, M. et al (2015)

5. Biocheck.ugent
We had 22 Farrow to finish farms by the time this analysis was made. Today, there is a total of 36 farms, but not all of them are farrow to finish.
The average herd size was 590 (with a range going from 220 to 2300).
In the external biosecurity, Ireland scores higher than all countries in all topics, except for the topics “Vermin and Control”, in which there is a tie with Sweden (78.5) and in the “Environment and region” in which Ireland looses to Sweden ( 78 vs 82).
The lowest overall score is in the “Feed, water and equipment supply”. This topic includes questions regarding the filling of the silos, purchase of feed if special hygienic requirements are needed and the checking of the water quality. The questions regarding material supply, on the other hand, are very specific and designed to identify farms with high health status, so most farms will have negative results. One of the questions is if there is a UV cabinet for foreign materials that need to be brought into stables?
To summarize this results, we can say that most farms impose a pig free time of over 12h to all visitors, all farms have rodent control programmes in place and most pig farms are located in areas with a low density of pigs.

6. Biocheck.ugent
To the contrary, the internal biosecurity scores are not so good.
Looking closely…
Ireland scores higher than the other 4 countries in disease management. Disease and management is assessing the presence of schemes and protocols in farms. This results are very good and reveal careful thought of the farm routines but it could also be related to the fact that our sample is small and biased once most farms assessed for the purpose of this analysis are Teagasc clients and therefore most of them have vaccination schemes, treatment protocols, regular evaluation made of the disease status and programs for herd health management in place.
Ireland didn’t score so well in the other topics… Ireland stands in 4th position in the Farrowing and the suckling period, and in last in the nursery unit management, in the fattening unit management and in the measures between compartments and the use of equipment.
In the Total score, Ireland is almost tied up with the mean from all four countries, it is tied up with Germany and it scores higher than Belgium.
The lowest score was the “measures between compartments and the use of equipment” because 95.4% of irish farmers (that’s 21 out of 22) admit never changing clothes between compartments or 73% of them (16/22) don’t wash their hands or change gloves between compartments.

7. Visiting Ghent University
With the IPHS Travel Bursary, I was able to travel to Ghent University in order to meet the backstage of the Biocheck.ugent questionnaire.
This visit was incredibly helpful to better understand issues with some questions and to discuss Ireland’s results, putting them against the other countries figures.
Merel Postma and Jeroen dewulf hosted me in Ghent University and they explained the insights of the Biocheck project and other related projects going on.
There was also a 2day Biocheck.ugent training scheduled but sadly it was cancelled due to the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels.

8. Comments and Suggestions
Design plan for the work flow
Washing hands more often
Changing clothes/boots
Biocheck assesses the pratices in place in the pig farm and it allows farmers to identify risks.
If you look at the raw answers the farmers gave at the questionnaire and after discussing them with Merel, the 3 main suggestions we have for the Irish farmers would be to…
Design a plan for the work flow: always work from the smallest animals to the biggest and from the healthy to the diseased ones. Adjust the work flow to the singularities of your farm.
Wash hands or change gloves more often – wash your hands every time you move to different compartments/stages
Change clothes and footwear every time you move… Leave stage-specific clothes and footwear at the entrance of each compartment
Notice that all of these suggestions are very simple and zero-cost, the effort is in making the change!

9. Comments and Suggestions
Summarizing, biosecurity relates to almost everything on pig farms and in Ireland, a lot has to improve regarding internal biosecurity…
From Merel’s talk and mine, one can notice the impact little changes can have.
“Little and often fills the purse.”

10. Comments and Suggestions
Farmer
Vet
Advisor
One of the tasks of this work was to raise awareness for the importance of biosecurity.
Meet with your advisor and your vet and DISCUSS the subject!!

11. Special thanks to…
Thanks for your attention!