Avian Metapneumovirus

While metapneumovirus has been a challenge in recent years, there are treatments available to help lower the virus load or eliminate it. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Welcome back to the Tonation Podcast, where we explore the story, science, and challenges shaping the livestock industry today. I'm your host, Jill Funky. Joining the program with me today is Dale Simpkins. He's the senior key account manager at Kemmon. Dale partners closely with producers and distribution partners like Soonation Ag Center to implement water disinfection solutions across animal health operations. Thanks for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Now, we ask Dale to join us and talk about avian metanumovirus, which is a highly contagious respiratory virus that primarily affects poultry. This virus spreads easily as wild birds act as natural reservoirs. Transmission is going to happen primarily through direct contact with respiratory secretions, contaminated equipment, or through rodents and insects. And the scary thing is the spread of this virus is global while two subtypes have severely impacted the North American commercial poultry industry. So that's why we're talking about that today. So Dale, what have you seen recently in the field with this disease?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Well, avian metanumovirus, commonly known as Pneumo, that's called caused significant losses in poultry, whether it be turkey, commercial layers, broilers, or broiler breeders. And it's increased our focus on biosecurity and the challenges that we have with that, especially today with pneumovirus, because that puts a strain on our poultry production, especially as we continue to battle with high pathaven influenza at the same time. So it's it was very difficult to detect early on, back in 2023, before we absolutely identified it as met a pneumovirus. It had been misdiagnosed as laryngotracheitis, which is another respiratory disease that we deal with in poultry. So that caused a lot of losses initially because it was being misdiagnosed.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Can you talk a little bit about the impact that avian pneumo has?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

I speak with a lot of integrators. That's mainly my job. And there's been several integrators that have expressed that they can have up to 50% mortality in a flock. And this was mainly, like I said a few minutes ago, before the virus was identified because of the misdiagnosis with LT. The loss of birds to this virus is devastating in a lot of ways to the grower because it affects the grower's livelihood and it's affects the integrators, and it affects the public because it interrupts the supply of poultry to the dinner table, basically. And due to the fast spreading of the virus and overall impact it can have, it requires diligent attention and a heightened attention to farm and equipment biosecurity, along with people, and I think you mentioned a few minutes ago, rodent control and insect control.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Yeah, can you talk about the importance of the biosecurity and disinfection practices to help address disease challenges like this?

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Sure. Sometimes we get complacent, right? Although high path AI pretty much keeps us on our toes today compared to say five years ago. So there's a lot of steps to biosecurity, and there are a lot of vectors that affect biosecurity. So humans, the people going in and out of the farm on a daily basis, the equipment going in and out of the farm, rodents, insects, bird movement, and equipment to move birds. We really need to focus on making sure that we're covering all of those bases to get us a really good biosecurity program.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Now I want to transition to a recent study that was completed showing how unactivated and activated prooxine AH affects the avian metanumo. Can you tell us more about that product and what unactivated versus activated means? And maybe some, you know, some information about the results?

SPEAKER_01 4:41

So Kevin, we we're the manufacturer of Prooxine AH, and the AH stands for animal health. So this is a 5% stabilized chlorine dioxide. And in the stabilized form, or if we want to break it down into unactivated and activated, that would be the unactivated form. We can apply as a preventative step over live animals going by the on label that this can be used over animals for odor control. So we either fog or spray this directly over the birds without the birds being depopulated. Now by adding an acid to the prooxine, we can generate what we call free chlorine dioxide or the activated chlorine dioxide. So this is a much stronger approach to disinfection. We control bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens by doing this. With this approach, we can disinfect animal confinement areas, we can disinfect equipment, we can disinfect food processing equipment with the intent in killing most of the known pathogens that we deal with in the poultry industry or in animal production in general.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Very good. Anything else that you want to say at a high level about those test results?

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Yeah, that's actually a great question. So during the study, they looked at three different approaches. One was the odor control or the unactivated chlorine dioxide pro-oxine. So they ran that at 1,000 ppm, and that showed a three-log reduction in the virus, which, as an unactivated product, meaning that we didn't add acid to it, those are very good results. And then we did what we would call premise disinfection, which is a 500 ppm activated solution, and that completely killed the virus, which for us at Kemmon, it wasn't really all that surprising because we use that application to combat a lot of other viruses, including the one we were talking about earlier, high path, avian influenza, canine parvovirus, and then in the swine industry, there's a couple of well-known ones there that we use prooxine on porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, which is PEDV for everybody in the swine business, and then porcine reproductive respiratory syndrome. And we were able to kill those viruses also.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Which that's been really hard to kill.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah, it's a very difficult one. Yeah, that's right. The third and final, uh, last but not least, I guess, is uh the one that I'm really passionate about, and the one that I've been working on for the past 12 or 13 years is the water treatment. So we looked at different PPM levels. Um, so parts per million in the water, that's why we would measure it, that we commonly deal with water sanitation and poultry production. Although this level is a lot lower than premise disinfection, it still showed really good reduction anywhere from a 1.3 log to 2.7 log. And we really did that portion of this study to confirm back to our customers that had stated they what they were seeing, and we were able to do that during this study.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

So when we're talking about products, I always ask this question, and that is from a management side. So, how can we pair the treatment and the products with good management practices? And so I'm sure that you give advice on that. What are some of the most common pieces of management advice that you have, whether it's the poultry or the swine producers that you come into contact with?

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Not only do we produce the prooxine AH, but we have a group at Kemon that is called KAS, or we commonly refer them to as CAS. They're our engineering uh group, and they engineer equipment for us to be able to administer the chlorine dioxide at a very precise level. And it was the equipment was built specifically for prooxine. So that that's how we do that. And without getting too deep into it, we can we kind of take however many birds or swine are on a farm and we figure out what the flow rate of the water is to know what the dosage is, and then we use an ultrasonic flow meter to measure that flow in the line to tell the pumps exactly how much of the activated prooxine to put in the water lines.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

What are some key takeaways that you would like to leave our listeners and any kind of producers out there? What do you want them to be left with from this episode?

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Well, I think probably mostly would be that you know metanumovirus has been a really tough challenge since 2023. And this is just another tool besides the vaccines that um they've been allowed to use in the last couple of years. This is another excellent tool to help them lower the virus load and/or get rid of it to help the birds not stress from the respiratory.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Well, I'd really like to thank you, Dale, for sharing your knowledge and experience with this disease and your new products and with some good reminders about the management. Particularly, I always I always harp on the rodent part and the insects. Um, because if you see a few of those, then you already have a problem. So I think we've wrapped up everything we want to talk about about avian metanomovirus, and I'd like to really thank our listeners for continuing to tune in. We're gonna catch you next time with more guests and topics shaping the current ag industry.