(Radio Iowa) – Iowa State University researchers estimate a viral disease cost the U-S pork industry more than one-billion dollars each year between 2016 and 2020. Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome or PRRS (PURS) can be deadly for pigs, and it can reduce a sow’s ability to give birth to healthy piglets. Derald Holtkamp, an I-S-U professor in veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine, says it’s hard to stay ahead of PRRS because it mutates so quickly. “Several times we thought we had the PRRS virus kind of sorted out,” Holtkamp says. “We thought we had solutions to control it and within a few years, we are made to look stupid again. It just has this ability to continually evolve.”

Piglets (ISU photo)

Researchers say the economic impact in 2020 was 80-percent higher than it was a decade ago, mostly due to higher rates of pig herds getting infected and poorer productivity in infected herds. “The only way to really slow that down or prevent it is with biosecurity,” Holtkamp says. “We have to get better as an industry of preventing that virus from moving from one farm to the next or prevent it from getting into farms.” That includes taking extra precautions, Holtkamp says, like sanitizing livestock trailers.

(story contributed by Rachel Cramer, Iowa Public Radio)