Managing Marek’s disease in the egg industry

Publication date: Available online 2 February 2019Source: EpidemicsAuthor(s): Carly Rozins, Troy Day, Scott GreenhalghAbstractThe industrialization of farming has had an enormous impact. To most, this impact is viewed solely in the context of productivity, but the denser living conditions and shorter rearing periods of industrial livestock farms provide pathogens with an ideal opportunity to spread and evolve. For example, the industrialization of poultry farms drove the Marek’s disease virus (MDV) to evolve from a mild paralytic syndrome to a highly contagious, globally prevalent, deadly disease. Fortunately, the economic catastrophe that would occur from MDV evolution is prevented through the widespread use of live imperfect vaccines that limit disease symptoms, but fail to prevent transmission. Unfortunately, the continued rollout of such imperfect vaccines is steering MDV evolution towards even greater virulence, and the ability to evade vaccine protection. Thus, there is a need to investigate alternative economically viable control measures for their ability to inhibit MDV spread and evolution. In what follows we examine the economic viability of standard husbandry practices for their ability to inhibit the spread of both virulent MDV and very virulent MDV throughout an industrialized egg farm. To do this, we parameterize a MDV transmission model and calculate the loss in egg production due to MDV. We find that MDV strain and the cohort duration have the greatest influ...

Source: Epidemics - February 2, 2019 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research