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Practitioner’s approach to neonatal diarrhea
William L. Hollis, DVM
Carthage Veterinary Service, Ltd.
2009 Allen D. Leman Swine Conference
Introduction
When challenged with an outbreak of diarrhea in the farrowing house, your best approach as a veterinary practitioner is to collect multiple samples and initiate therapy at the same time. When on-farm to investigate an outbreak of scours my approach includes diagnostics, the initiation of treatment, and a review of on-farm prevention programs. It is very common that I will break these three apart and review them over the course of the coming 710 days, but most critical is the need to initiate therapy to prevent losses and further evaluate the risks of the worst case scenarios.
Diagnostics
Diagnostics begin with evaluation of the age of piglets at the onset of diarrhea. Early bacterial infections of E. coli and Clostridium create watery diarrhea within the first few days of life. Reports have noted scouring piglets within that first 24 hours when piglets are not receiving appropriate colostrum and sanitation levels have suffered. The age of the piglet is critical because two other common causes of diarrhea in the piglet require additional time to create the disease symptoms.
Namely coccidia and rotavirus are common in many production systems today, but rotavirus takes at least five days to initiate destruction of the villi and create diarrhea and coccidia even further with a 5-9 day infectious period in the cells, but a 7-10 day presence of scours.
Once new information is collected about the age of piglets,
then the appearance of the scouring material itself is important. Watery diarrhea the first two or three days will cause the entire litter to be covered with the watery material. These piglets may look the same if rotavirus is present, but rotavirus will initiate later and can at some point create vomiting in piglets as the virus moves quickly and the destruction of intestinal tissue creates nausea and malaise throughout the body system.
Most important to the long-term picture is complete diagnostic
work-up with the collection of fresh fecal samples from piglets that have just begun to scour as well as tissue samples of multiple segments of small and large intestines. It is critical to collect fecal’s from piglets that are early in the infection as both coccidia and rotavirus can be quite clearing of the infectious organism after the scours have been present for a couple of days. Early infectious piglets within the first day of diarrhea and piglets that have not yet been treated with antibiotics are going to be your best candidate for your selection for diagnostic sampling. Many farm staff can even collect this material quickly, but it is important that the rapid transit on ice be achieved as Clostridium A and Clostridium difficile may be competitively
overgrown by other non-specific Clostridium. Your ability to identify the appropriate diagnostic sample is challenging at best.
Treatments
Immediate treatments include antibiotic standard operating
procedures as I have outlined with a Sample Baby Pig Treatment Chart (See Table 1). These treatments at least initiate therapy to reduce losses, but in the event of chronic diarrhea’s that do not resolve or lead to more severe outbreaks of multiple litters, a combination of both a treatment program as well as prevention is critical.
Antibiotic treatments are commonly initiated with an aminoglycoside such as Gentamicin as an injectable in the case of E. coli or Spectinomycin oral in the case of Clostridium’s. In my hands, many of these antibiotic treatments
are secondary to a good solid prevention program and may be a crutch in those cases where we have been ineffective in establishing appropriate colostrum uptake and immune prevention of disease. Nonetheless, these treatments are common in most farrowing houses and need to be on the shelf and initiated in the event we have litters that are wet and scouring. The faster we get on these treatments and quickly initiate follow-up for these litters, the less likely they will spread. |
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