Intrauterine PED Vaccination Offers Alternative to Needles

Feb 28, 2022

Intrauterine vaccination to protect sows and their offspring from Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea offers a potential alternative to needles. The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization has developed the first intrauterine vaccines to protect sows, gilts and their piglets from Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus. Over the next year researchers will be assessing various formulations to determine which are the most protective to the sow and what gets passed on to protect the piglets.

Dr. Heather Wilson, a research scientist with VIDO, notes when you administer a vaccine into the muscle with a needle, especially with livestock, you worry about needle breakage as well as stress to the animals.

Clip-Dr. Heather Wilson-Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization:

We've always been interested in using alternative routes of immunization to try to get away from simply doing needle-based vaccines to see if we can administer the vaccines to the mucosal sites where the disease actually manifests so we were looking at the uterus.

We know that the uterus is being accessed about three times a year during breeding and we thought that that might be a very good time to administer a vaccine to the uterus and protect the pigs from reproductive diseases. What we have done is we've taken advantage of the normal breeding practices and we're coupling breeding with immunization. In that case we don't require needles.

We administer the vaccine into the semen bag and then that gets attached to a catheter and then that gets taken up into the uterus so it's a lot less stressful for the animals and it's nice that it is targeting the uterus which is one of the organs that the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus attacks so it's a very targeted approach.

Source : Farmscape

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.