Investigadores ingleses estudian los lazos de union entre el PMWS y el PCV2

//02 Sep 2010
Researchers from the Department of Biological Science, University of Warwick in the UK carried out a cohort study of post-weaning multisystemic wasting syndrome and PCV2 in 178 pigs from birth to 14 weeks on a single farm in England.
The hypothesis was that pigs that develop post-weaning multisystemic wasting syndrome (PMWS) are detectable from an early age with signs of weight loss and other clinical and serological abnormalities. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the temporally varying and fixed events linked with the clinical incidence of PMWS by comparing affected and unaffected pigs in a cohort of 178 male piglets.
Piglets were enrolled at birth and examined each week. Samples of blood were collected at regular intervals. The exposures measured were porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV2) antibody titres in all 178 and PCV2 antigen in a subset of 75 piglets. Piglet health and weight was also recorded, and a post-mortem examination was performed by an external laboratory on all pigs between 6 and 14 weeks of age that died.
From the cohort, 14 (8%) pigs died from PMWS and 4% from other causes. A further 37 pigs between 6 and 14 weeks of age died from PMWS (30) and ileitis and other causes (7). PMWS was only apparent in pigs from 1 to 2 weeks before death when they wasted rapidly. There were no other characteristic clinical signs and no obvious gross clinical lesions post-mortem. There was no strong link with PCV2 antibody throughout life but PCV2 antigen level was higher from 4 to 6 weeks of age in pigs that died from PMWS compared with pigs that died from other causes.

This study was published in Prev Vet Med.