Lung Lesions in Pigs at Slaughter: A 2-Year Epidemiological Study in France

Lung lesions scoring at slaughter is difficult to plan and organize in pig production for veterinarians in France. A study was carried out as a service offered to veterinarians. All the herds for which they were interested in having lung scoring were proposed to be included into the study. For this, 7 technicians were trained to perform lung examinations and dispatched among the main French slaughterhouses from October 2003 to March 2004. In total, 110,865 pigs from 1196 herds located in the main area for pig production in France were scored. The majority of the herds were vaccinated against Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae for more than one year (899 herds). For all the herds, the pneumonia-free mean rate was 27.6%, the pneumonia mean score was 3.7/24, the pleuritis rate was 14.4%, and the abscess rate was 2.3%. The scoring system Intern J Appl Res Vet Med • Vol. 3, No. 3, 2005 Intern J Appl Res Vet Med • Vol. 3, No. 3, 2005 260 nomic importance (growth, feed efficiency, treatment costs, etc.). According to Grest and colleagues, the prevalence of lung lesions varies enormously in slaughterhouse surveys from different countries. The prevalence of pneumonia lesions ranges from 6% to 81%, pleuritis from 2% to 28%, and pleuropneumonia from 1% to 11%. Recent information on the prevalence of respiratory diseases in fattening pigs in France was lacking. Veterinarians have made some lung controls in slaughterhouses to monitor respiratory diseases. A limiting factor for them is the difficulty to plan and organize the controls. However, they are interested in having a better knowledge of the general situation in their country in order to improve understanding of their own observations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the importance of respiratory disease in an entire region. To achieve the objective of getting a large picture of the situation, we chose to include all the herds of which veterinarians were interested in having lung scoring. Thus, this choice implies that herds were not randomly selected. The first part of the study was carried out from October 2003 to December 2003 and allowed the control of 959 herds located in Brittany (27,208 km, 57% of French commercial pigs). The second part of the study was conducted in the region of the Loire Valley (32,404 km, 11% of French commercial pigs), neighbouring Brittany, from February 2004 to March 2004 using the same method. In this second part, we controlled 237 herds. This article displays all the results of the study. MATERIAL AND METHODS