Kaylee Hillinger 

Welcome to The Round Barn, a podcast devoted to all things livestock. Our goal is to offer provocative insights, challenge conventional wisdom, and never be boring. I’m your host for today, Kaylee Hillinger. Joining me is Dr. Jim Lowe, a large animal veterinarian and a member of the faculty at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois. Hey, Jim, how are you today? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

I’m fantastic, Kaylee. How are you? 

Kaylee Hillinger 

I am great. Thanks for being here. On our last episode, we talked about African Swine Fever and you scared me a little. And I’ve been reading some of the articles, and you said we are not ready for ASF. So that’s kind of what I want to talk about today is are we ready for ASF? Are we ready for foreign animal disease? 

Kaylee Hillinger 

What does some of these things look like? So kind of want to tear into that. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Well, that will be a depressing conversation. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Oh boy. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

You said we’re never boring, but we didn’t say we were depressing. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Might be a little interesting. Yes. So I was recently reading an article about ASF fatigue, and you kind of touched on that on our last podcast of we’ve been talking about ASF endlessly in the swine industry for the last five years since it really rocked China and the fear of it coming to the U.S. and you didn’t give us the – the true answer, the billion dollar question about why we don’t have ASF in the United States. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

But a few insights to that. But that just kind of got me thinking after you said we’re not ready, what if there was a positive pig in central Illinois of ASF? Back to spaying cats. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Back to spaying cats. But which is a scary, scary, scary proposition. But so we got the official policy of what we’re going to do. And so everybody’s talked about that ad nauseum, Right? So we’ll have a 72 hour stop movement order. So no animals move for 72 hours. We don’t- you know, we don’t harvest pigs. We don’t wean pigs. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

We don’t do anything for 72 hours. And then we’re going to do something after that. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Something. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

We’re going to do something. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. Does someone smarter than me have the answer to what something is, or…? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Well, I think there’s kind of a plan, but it’s a little bit up in the air because they don’t really understand what we’re going to see when that happens. So the goal of the stop movement is to say, “Can we find all the disease?” So if we find it in Urbana, Illinois, then the question is they’re going to go ring test. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So test around the positive herd. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

In like a certain distance. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

In a certain distance, Yeah. And so the OIE would say basically five kilometers. Right. They’re going to go test now. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

What’s the OIE? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

The World Organization for Animal Health. That’s an old French acronym. We don’t call it that anymore, but it’s the World Organization for Animal Health. But the acronym is still OIE. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. Yeah. The words you said don’t match. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

No they don’t. They used to. But the goal is you go ring test. You know, that’s kind of the playbook out of OIE and this is what we do globally. And we’ve all signed up to these agreements and said we’re going to play by these set of rules. Now, obviously, we move a lot of pigs in the U.S. and so then there’ll be a traceback process to say, okay, where did pigs move out of that site and let’s go test those sites and ring test around those sites. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So the theory is, is that when I see the first case, 72 hours buys me enough time to find all the cases. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

To contain it. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And then we can depopulate that stomp it out and life is grand. That’s the strategy. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

That sounds like a great plan. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

That’s the playbook. And that’s really the old red book, which is what, you know, USDA revises and uses to guide policy response. And so that’s OIE, adapted by USDA, federal government. And the state governments have to interpret that through the silos, would interpret that and push it through. And so they’d work together to work this out. And that’s kind of where they’re – that’s the plan. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And it all sounds good, but even everyone in the system understands, “What if we don’t find it all?” 

Kaylee Hillinger 

What if a feed truck comes in? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Well, it’s all stop movements, right? So the problem isn’t we can stop everything for 72 hours. The problem is the assumption is- not the problem. The problem is the assumption. The assumption is, is that 72 hours allows me to find all the known cases. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Now, ASF has a relatively long incubation period. So if I have one infected animal, it takes a long time to get the second one. They can be infected. They’re infectious before they are clinical. So they’re infected and infectious, but they don’t have signs of the disease yet. So if we miss it, we may not have found all of the cases off of that original case. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

It sounds a lot like early 2020 with humans. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

It’s the same playbook. Yeah. Mm hmm. And we see how that worked, right? And so I think everybody is acutely aware of that. That’s what I said when I kind of said, what happens next? I don’t know, because I think everybody’s in that same boat going, okay, this is the plan and this is what the rulebook says. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

But that’s not been successful in ASF anywhere else. It didn’t work on PED and PED was a different response because it wasn’t federally mandated. It’s not a foreign animal disease. But it sure didn’t work in COVID. And so you start to question, I think everybody saying, “Oh, what are we going to do?” Because it might be more widespread than what we think. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

As we talked, ASF doesn’t spread that easy. So maybe it won’t be very far. But I think that’s why we can’t get anybody to commit, and I would if I was in their shoes, I wouldn’t commit either to say “this is exactly what we’re going to do”, because I think they don’t know. They have to think through what’s going to happen. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Now we’ve done some work here. Ben Blair, former grad student here, did some work looking at what happens with a stop movement order. And what happens if you open it back up? So let’s say – and so the plan is, okay, here’s the disease. We draw these circles around it. We have an infected zone, a control zone. We don’t allow movements- 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

outside of that. Right? There’s all these rules. But if you do that right, and you do that, but you miss the infection, there’s an infection outside that zone. When you put that stop movement in that zone, you alter all the other trade patterns. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So we did that in cull sows. But we can demonstrate. And so COVID gave us a perfect deal. They closed a packing plant, a cull sows packing plant. So it allowed us to model what happens when you close that. So we built a model and said, “Okay, how does trade normally work?” And you have the normally traded animals like this and we can work through that cull sows. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And then we said, “Okay, let’s close the plant,” which they did. Does the model still hold up? Well what we predicted is exactly. Well basically what happened right within the tolerance of the models we had. Okay. So the problem is you have a stop movement order and you stop all the movements. But if there’s infections outside the zone where you think they’re infected, you actually could spread the disease more broadly because you change how trade works. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So it’s- that’s- 

Kaylee Hillinger 

You kind of rob Peter to pay Paul and then just spread the infection a little more. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And the gut is – your gut response is it has – your assumption is, “I know where the virus is, I know where the infections are.” And that’s that’s really, really hard. And I think that’s why when I say we’re “not prepared,” nobody can work their head through how that’s going to – what what that looks like. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. So it’s not- it’s not that we don’t have a plan, it’s just that there might be a few gaps in the execution of the plan, just based on the fact that it’s a virus, it’s complex. Biological systems are complex. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah. And the plan is, is that we’ve made one big assumption, which is the only assumption you can make. And the assumption might be wrong. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. Okay. And we all know about assumptions. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

We all know about assumptions. And the good part is so before everybody loses their mind, the good part is everybody knows that that assumption could be wrong. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So it’s not like everybody’s charging blindly ahead, going, “Well, this is what we’re going to do and it’s going to work.” Everybody is kind of like “it might not work”. Therefore, how do we start thinking about that? So that’s why you’ve seen all these meetings and tabletop exercises and the pork board talks about it 17 days a week and producers talk about it… 

Kaylee Hillinger 

For the last five plus years, right? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And so everybody sits and works through that stuff because they understand the playbook we’ve had may not be right for this disease. And I think more importantly, this industry. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. So, so there’s a playbook for this one. Is this same playbook in place for other foreign animal diseases? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, we got one playbook basically. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

One playbook that covers them all. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Covers them all, basically. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

How do you feel about that? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

I think if I was going to have it, you’re better to have one playbook you can execute than two that you can’t execute. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

My concern, I think everybody’s rational concern is, is that we haven’t – we don’t have – we, the royal we don’t have a good understanding of the complexities of the industry, the cattle industry, the pig industry, lean poultry. We may be too, but. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

So the complexities of? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

The supply chain. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So how animals move, where we source stuff from. You know, and we had PED in 2014, Joe Connor, a veterinarian in Carthage, went back and pulled a number of sources onto a sow farm. And there were like 74 things on a sow farm that came from China that nobody knew came from China. Now it isn’t a big deal. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

But you start- we were trying to track down where the virus come from. The virus- PED virus is clearly Chinese lineage. And you’re like, “I don’t know, there’s 74 things on this farm. They came from China. Where do I start?” 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Like pencils. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, that was stuff that was used every day. I’m not talking about equipment or some computers. I mean, there were 74 consumables that were used every day, came into that farm on a very routine basis that showed up from China and that included vitamins and all kinds of stuff. Right? So it’s – the supply chain is really, really complicated. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

We move pigs all over. You’ve seen those maps where we, right? Pigs moved and traded all over, even – even if they’re not sold, they move all over the place. And so our playbooks haven’t necessarily accounted for all that complexity. There’s work being done. I mean, there’s – there’s some modeling work being done. Ben’s involved in that up at Minnesota to say, what does it look like and how do we do it? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

But even there, the industry is so complex that the computer almost can’t handle it. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Right. So many different inputs. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So many variables and so many inputs that you end up simplifying the model because we don’t have enough comp – I suppose we had some supercomputer, but the way the software has been written to do this kind of modeling, nobody’s fired up ChatGTP to figure this out, right? Or they wouldn’t, right? But we don’t put those kind of resources at it. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So the available software really struggles with the degree of complexity we’ve got from the industry. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And so it – it makes all this very, very hard. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

All right. So we’ve talked about like the pig component of it. Are there foreign animal diseases that we’re worried about that would cross species and like really blow the whole thing out of the water? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, the big one is foot-and-mouth disease, right? So foot-and -mouth disease is everything that’s cloven hooves. So pigs and cows and sheep and goats, but deer and elk and all the other big wildlife are all also susceptible. So now you’ve got a reservoir with foot-and-mouth disease, not just of domestic animals, but wild animals. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Well, we really did go down a depressing path. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, we’re going down a depressing rabbit hole here. And foot-and-mouth disease, unlike ASF, transmits very, very easily. Right? So it blows in the wind and it’s an itty bitty virus and it’s super stable in the environment. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

But across all those species too, I mean that would- we have deer in our backyard and they go traipsing through somewhere and yeah. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

You know if that- I won’t say that- the deer eat all of our bushes so it would be nice if we didn’t have quite so many deer. But it’s not worth it. But the – right you start the complexity of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak is astronomically higher than an ASF outbreak or a classical swine fever hog cholera outbreak because you got multiple species involved. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, right. This AI, this High Path AI outbreak in chickens is a disaster, right? 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Avian influenza, right. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

High Path Avian Influenza. Right. And it’s a disaster. And USDA is struggling to get that disaster under control. And that’s one species, a couple of species. But it’s birds, right? It’s – birds don’t move. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

What do you mean birds don’t move? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Well, layer hens go to a layer barn and they stay in the layer barn. It’s not like I have a south farm where I make ween pigs and I ship pigs out every week. Or I’m sure I’m shipping feeder calves across the country and pooling them from 74 sources or blah, blah, blah. So the poultry industry is relatively simple in its organization compared to the complexity of the swine. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And then the cattle industry is an order of magnitude more complicated because of the change of ownership. And so, you know, we struggle with ASF, we struggle with PED. I was going to say we struggle with High Path AI. We struggle with PED. We struggle with ASF. But boy, foot-and-mouth adds a real, real layer of complexity because of multiple species and who’s going to play along. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And it’s hard to get one industry to get together, let alone two or three or four industries to get their act together. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. So to that point we’re talking about – we’ve talked about the playbook for ASF. What’s the playbook for something that crosses all those species? And so are all of these boards and people and groups and highly intellectual people working together to ensure the playbooks fit? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Same. Well, that’s where the playbook gets really complicated, right? Because now I’ve got to positive FMD. So I’m not just quarantining in Urbana, Illinois, the pigs. I’ve got to quarantine all. So just think about I mean, there aren’t many livestock here, it’s eastern Illinois, right? Eastern Central Illinois. There aren’t many livestock in this county or in the three counties surrounding us. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

But if you were with pigs, you’re like, okay, I can get this many USDA and Illinois Department of AG Resources at the table. But now I got to put resources from not just after this ten pig farms, but now I’ve got 40 cattle farms and 30 people with sheep and and, and. And so it’s not just the disease transmits differently. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

It’s the testing and the follow up and the mass requirements are orders of magnitude harder because there’s just more farms, more follow up, there’s more testing to do. So that one scares me because I don’t think they have the resources for ASF. I don’t know what we do with the resources for foot-in-mouth. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Does that one scare you more? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, because it’s more communicable. It’s easier to transmit. Now people aren’t as worried about foot-and-mouth because we’ve got a vaccine. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

It’s still got real trade implications. We’re going to struggle to export with that. But I think if you look at ASF, you can come up with a scenario where you might have 10 or 12 farms infected and you could stomp it out. And if we didn’t get it into too many wild pigs, we might be okay. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Does the vaccine prevent infection or limit spread? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Both for foot-and-mouth. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

With ASF, right, we might have eight or ten farms infected. Those eight or ten farms, we kind of get it stomped out. Okay. It’s horrible for the industry. We don’t have it a lot of places. Foot-and-mouth really transmits easily. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

And we’re not finding all of the deer in Champaign county and vaccinating them and… 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, right. And so you can see where yes, we could get ahead of it with vaccination, but we couldn’t regionalize and get back to exporting very quickly. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Right. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

We’d have huge parts of the country infected with FMD and we’d be trying to vaccinate our way out of it, which we could do. And there’s a playbook and we can make all that happen. But that’s a long process to get out of that mess. People are scared of ASF because we don’t have vaccine. The only controlled method is depopulation. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So it’s just pick your poison. ASF, no vaccine, doesn’t transmit very easily, one species. Foot-and-mouth disease, have vaccine, transmits very easily, lots of species. And so it’s just the magnitude, an FMD outbreak is likely to be a lot bigger. And yes, we’ve got a tool to eradicate it, but it could be a long time until we get it eradicated. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

So we said we wouldn’t be boring. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

No, no, no. And we are depressing. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

We are depressing. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

But these are probably not high likelihood events. That’s that’s the thing, right? 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Not high likelihood, but highly talked about. So in the industry, I feel the pressure, which is probably good because we need to be cautious and aware. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, if we didn’t feel the pressure, we would be in trouble. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

We would have it. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

We’d have it. That’s exactly right. So the pressure is good, but the likelihood is still probably low. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay, that was nice. To end that on a positive note. We went real down deep. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

They always call me Dr. Positive. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

I bet they do. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

I don’t think anybody’s ever said that. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

To find that one person who called you Dr. Positive. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

That’s exactly right. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Fantastic. Well, thank you for your insights. Really appreciate that. And thanks for bringing it up at the end a little bit. Thanks for joining us. Please subscribe and tell your friends about the Round Barn. It’s available on iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice. One last thing. In addition to this podcast, we offer a wide range of online learning opportunities for livestock producers and veterinarians, including a new master veterinary science degree. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

You can learn more about those by visiting online.vetmed.illinois.edu. Thanks for listening.