Streptococcus zooepidemicus is a disease that can spread among pigs and quickly send their temperatures soaring to 40 degrees.
Dr. Matheus Costa, an Assistant Professor with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine and an adjunct professor with Utrecht University, says researchers have found Strep zoo transmission requires direct pig to pig contact but, once infected, symptoms show up within eight hours.
Symptoms resemble African Swine Fever.
We have also found that good sampling methodologies involve nasal swabs and rectal swabs. We expected mouth swabs to be good diagnostic samples as well but we did not observe that.
But still, the beauty of being able to detect this bacteria from feces is that you can collect pooled samples from a group of pigs and it's much easier and faster than collecting nasal swabs.
Another finding is we observed that pigs that were not inoculated but were kept in the same room with inoculated pigs did not become infected during the clinical trial. It was very surprising.
