Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus
Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) is a coronavirus that infects pigs causing severe disease and mortality in young piglets but less severe disease in adult pigs. PEDv does not transmit to humans and is also not transmissible to humans via food (so it is not a food-borne disease risk). PEDv is an economically important disease for agriculture. ransmission is predominantly fecal-oral and infected pigs shed large amounts of virus into their environment during the course of their infection which creates an environmental reservoir of the pathogen which can infected other animals. While a vaccine against PEDv has been used outside of Canada and has been shown to reduce both morbidity and mortality, the Canadian PEDv is a newly emerged strain for which there is no vaccine available at this time. However, new vaccine trials have shown that the PEDv vaccine in development seems to enhance disease symptoms and virus replication in vaccinated individuals. Do you think that it would be possible to control the spread of PEDv on a farm using biosecurity measures alone (so relying on things like cleaning etc.)? Under what circumstances?