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. 2022 Jul 6;12(14):1737.
doi: 10.3390/ani12141737.

Evidence-Based Recommendations for Herd Health Management of Porcine Post-Weaning Diarrhea

Esben Østergaard Eriksen  1 , Ken Steen Pedersen  1   2 , Inge Larsen  1 , Jens Peter Nielsen  1
Affiliations

Evidence-Based Recommendations for Herd Health Management of Porcine Post-Weaning Diarrhea

Esben Østergaard Eriksen et al. Animals (Basel). .

Abstract

Aided by their advising veterinarians, pig producers need to make difficult decisions regarding herd health management strategies. For instance, the preventive use of antimicrobials and medicinal zinc oxide must be substituted with more sustainable preventive approaches to porcine post-weaning diarrhea. Veterinarians and pig producers may find assistance in knowledge based on evidence in this regard; however, the overwhelming scientific literature is not always readily available. The overall aim of this paper is to suggest herd health management decision-support tools that can aid veterinary-assisted decision making in the control of porcine post-weaning diarrhea at a tactical level. The first objective was to validate the need for a herd health management concept, including two decision-support tools. The second objective was to develop evidence-based recommendations that can aid veterinary-assisted decision-making for the herd health management of post-weaning diarrhea. The first objective was investigated by a questionnaire-based study among veterinary pig practitioners in Denmark. For the second objective, we conducted a scientific summary based on scientific review papers identified through a systematic search in three databases. From the papers, we synthesized and extracted 79 specific recommendations. In this paper, we report comprehensive evidence-based recommendations for the herd health management of post-weaning diarrhea.

Keywords: decision-making; decision-support tool; evidence-based veterinary medicine; herd health management; pig; post-weaning diarrhea; scientific summary.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have received funding for past and present research activities by the Danish pork production industry and the authorities regulating the swine Danish production. We declare that this has not inappropriately influenced the present work.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Outline of how we made our evidence-based recommendations.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Flow chart of the searching, sorting and inclusion of review papers for the scientific summary. Modified from [22]: Page MJ, McKenzie JE, Bossuyt PM, Boutron I, Hoffmann TC, Mulrow CD, et al. The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ 2021; 372: n71. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71 (accessed on 8 June 2022).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Danish veterinarians scoring the usefulness of five different tools for herd health advice regarding the out-phasing of medicinal zinc.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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