Pilot activity: Use of rapid methods for animal health, animal welfare and food safety

By Thorsten Klauke, Co-authors Maren Bruns, Matilde Piñeiro and Detert Brinkmann

 

Animal health and food safety issues are becoming increasingly important to all sectors of livestock production. The improvement in the health and welfare of pigs are important factors that will determine the sustainability of the European pig production in the next years. Therefore results of general and selected measures are important indicators for the pig health status.

 

One of the Q-PorkChains pilot chains attends to focus on general pig health measures. Scientific and business actors are collaborating on the development of a rapid test on Acute Phase Proteins (APPs) for animal health, animal welfare and food safety. A demonstrable and sustainable improvement in pig health is achieved as a contributing segment to the recovery of the pig industry and a sustainable rural economy.

 

The team in this pilot chain is concentrating on three subtasks:

• Development of an APP rapid test at lab level.
• Implementation of the rapid test into pork production at farm level.
• Analysis of relationships between APP levels and meat quality traits based on studies of the universities of Bonn and Aarhus.

APPs are plasma proteins that modify their concentration following infection, inflammation, trauma or stress. The circulating concentrations of these proteins can provide an objective unit of measurement of the health status of an animal and are increasingly being used as markers for animal health and welfare in farm animals such as pigs or cattle. APP assay can identify herds where poor hygiene, lack of surveillance, poor vaccination responses or other factors have lead to immunological stress and a reduction of feed conversion. Measuring APP concentration will be valuable to assess the health status of new groups of animals entering to the farm, as well as for final inspection of slaughter pigs, improving surveillance programs.

 

The rapid test is tested in this pilot chain at lab level. After that the implementation is started. The developed rapid test shall be implemented for on-farm use at living pigs to identify their health status. Aim of this approach is the incorporation of routinely APP monitoring in integrated quality systems that allows a sequential health analysis of pig stocks.

 

Further more, studies focussing on the correlation between APP levels and meat quality traits is still under performance. One study intends to analyse an influence of APP level on meat quality traits in general (1). A second study includes the effect of stress on meat quality and APP reaction (2). Important performance criteria at farm and slaughter level are measured. Both Pig-MAP and haptoglobin (Hp) are analysed in blood plasma obtained from pig carcasses during slaughter in the studies (1 and 2).

 

The main benefits for the industry are:

• Within the scope of quality management the improvement in pig health and resulting welfare status can be measured.
• Farmers and pig industry will be enabled to identify and breed healthier and more productive pigs. Since risks can be quantified easier and disease surveillance information available to pig producers can be enhanced.
• The communication between the actors in the production chain can be improved.
• The health of pigs will benefit consumers through better quality meat and meat products. Food safety is increased.

The team of this pilot chain (out of eight pilot chains) consists of the following partners: PigCHAMP Pro, Matilde Pineiro University of Bonn, Detert Brinkmann and Thorsten Klauke GIQS e.V., Maren Bruns