Last month when a small homestead farm in Oregon broke with the first porcine case of H5N1, many lessons were learned when dealing with the “transitional pigs,” says Ryan Scholz. While Oregon is not home to large-scale, commercial swine operations, the state does have a fairly robust show pig industry. However, the Oregon Department of Agriculture state veterinarian says he soon realized these lifestyle-type farms really do “break all the rules” when it comes to disease response.

“These pigs are probably closer in how they've been raised, the biosecurity level they had, all of that, to working with feral pigs than they were to working with domestic pigs in confinement,” says Scholz. “Exposures that we don’t think would happen, they do.”

One such exposure Scholz references was the owner witnessing one of the Kunekune pigs eating a dead duck, following multiple cases of waterfowl on the farm developing neurological symptoms and dying over about three days. Genomic sequencing of samples from the migratory birds in the area showed very similar sequences to the D1.2 genotype of H5N1 detected in the poultry on the farm.

“We commonly see waterfowl being relatively asymptomatic, but they are typically the spreaders on farms- they can remain infected for months,” he says.

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Scholz, who provided an overview of the first detection of H5N1 in pigs during a Swine Health Information Center/American Association of Swine Veterinarians webinar, says another discovery was the farm not only had three Kunekune pigs, but also two miniature teacup pigs that were housed with the chickens, approximately 15 feet from the waterfowl pond.

“The teacup minis were about the size of their Barred Rock chickens and kind of blended in with the chickens. They were housed in the chicken coop with them, and so they were not originally sampled during our first visit,” Scholz says.

While the authorities were able to sample the two teacup mini pigs and three Kunekune pigs without much difficulty, depopulating the 250-pound Kunekune pigs proved otherwise.

“Typically, as a regulatory vet, most of the training, most of the equipment that we have is geared towards domestic pigs that are in confinement, or backyard show pigs that still have some sort of confinement option,” Scholz says. “There was no confinement option here.”

Although the owner didn’t see the pigs exhibiting any clinical signs of disease, authorities elected to sedate and euthanize the animals, since pigs are a high-risk species for virus mutation and reassortment. With the owners already reporting illness that predated the HPAI symptoms in the animals, there was additional concern that there may be other human influenza viruses present on the property. Although the humans were not infected with influenza, Scholz says the risk of transmission to people was a far bigger factor than the risk that the people had a separate influenza infection that they could introduce.

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However, Scholz notes the team did run up against some headwinds with the USDA, in convincing them that the pigs needed to be euthanized and were truly infected. “I think that stems from a lot of the work and a lot of the knowledge in pigs is based on traditional pigs or exhibition pigs,” Scholz says.

Finally, Scholz says the last concerning issue that came from working with this homestead farm during the H5N1 outbreak, was the owners’ lack of exposure to information about biosecurity and livestock diseases in general, highlighting the shortcomings in regulatory outreach.

“Even a lot of our traditional small farms, our show industry, all of those, they've heard about diseases, they've heard about biosecurity. They may choose not to follow it, or there may be limitations to how far they are able to go in implementing strict biosecurity, but they've at least heard about it,” Scholz says. “A lot of these lifestyle farms, this growing homesteading trend, they have either never heard of biosecurity, or what they have heard just doesn’t apply to them. A lot of the traditional outreach we have done has missed the target with them.”

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