A Pig Pandemic? African Swine Fever has Come to the Americas for the First time in Four Decades

Oct 20, 2021

Another pandemic is knocking on our door, but this time it’s coming for the pigs, Wired reports. African swine fever, which wiped out half the pig population in China a couple years back, arrived in Haiti and the Dominican Republic this summer. Now, U.S. regulators are frantically trying to keep it away from the states. The disease poses no threat to humans, but it can devastate hog populations: There is no cure—though there are a handful of vaccine candidates—and the virus kills nearly all of the animals who become infected.

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Video: Screening Nursery Ingredients - Kynna Crawford

In this episode of The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, Kynna Crawford, Graduate Research Assistant at South Dakota State University, discusses how Plackett-Burman designs can help screen nursery diet ingredients for early post-weaning feed intake. She explains why low intake after weaning contributes to stress and mortality, how screening trials can evaluate multiple ingredients in a single study, and how the approach can support both research and commercial nursery nutrition decisions. Listen now on all major platforms!

Click here to read the full research article: https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/...

"A single screening trial can help identify which nursery ingredients deserve deeper research for early post-weaning feed intake."

Meet the guest: Kynna Crawford / kynna-crawford-a2610a3aa is a Master's student in Animal Sciences at South Dakota State University, where her work focuses on swine nutrition and nursery pig management. Her research examines strategies to alleviate weaning stress, including dietary approaches and screening tools to identify ingredients that may promote early feed intake. Learn more from Kynna Crawford on The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, available on all major platforms.