Notes on Animal Diseases

Abstract

With regard to treatment and prophylaxis, neither is of much value in dealing with the epizootic type of the disease, but with the enzootic piglet influenza attention to the sanitary conditions under which sows are farrowed and rear their young will usually effect a prompt improvement in the mortality rate of piglets. In Germany, where piglet influenza causes serious losses each year, farmers whose herds are infected are advised to isolate their farrowing sows individually, and special straw huts for farrowing are constructed in the fields. The sows farrow in these individual straw huts, and the young pigs are retained in a small run with their mother until they reach the age of eight weeks. There is some indication, from experiments at Kabete, that inoculation of young pigs with a vaccine prepared from a formalized lung containing virus is of help in controlling the incidence of piglet influenza, but there is no doubt of the success that attends a careful application of the method of individual isolation of farrowing sows in well ventilated temporary huts.