[MUSIC] So this week we've been talking about controlling an outbreak, how you change the anatomy of an infectious disease outbreak. How we can change what happens in infectious diseases, reducing the impact of an infection preventing it altogether, which is wonderful. But very often reducing the impact that that has on the individual animals. We've looked in three big areas, really. We've thought about things that we can do to the host. We think about things that we can to affect the pathogen. We also want to consider things that we can do to the environment. Because if you think about having an infectious disease outbreak on your own premises, if they were your particular animals. That's a really important factor that you'll be considering is, how are we going to break this infectious disease? How are we going to minimize all the production losses, minimize the disease severity, reduce the number of deaths, potential deaths that can occur from that, and reduce the long term effects. So it's a pretty important part of our management. When we think about it in sort of broad terms, one thing we can do, is we can stop, or reduce, the exposure, of individual animals to the pathogens themselves. And that is called biosecurity. Biosecurity really can be defined as the net result of all the procedures that an entity embarks on to prevent the entry of an infectious agent into the area or onto the premises that they're considering. That's biosecurity. And we can have biosecurity with reference to a particular area of a farm to the whole farm. We can have biosecurity for a region, or biosecurity for a nation, there are international protocols to stop infectious diseases entering into a nation. So biosecurity can happen at any level. The other epidemiological principal, apart from biosecurity, is one called biocontainment. And biocontainment means that you stop the movement of an infectious agent or a group of infectious agents around a particular premises. So biosecurity is stopping the entry onto a particular premises, or a particular site, or particular area. Biocontainment is stopping it moving around that area as well. So it's a sort of understand both of those different elements, and they're really all stopping or reducing the amount of exposure that an animal or a group of animals has to a pathogen. That has to be always done as part of your whole infectious disease strategy So don't forget we want to do things to increase the individual animals immunity so the disease is less severe. We've spoken about the importance of reducing the amount of stress on the animal, that will help reduce severity as well. And would also describe the importance of keeping records, understanding what's happening in the disease, what stage of the disease that you're in, and which animals are affected and what they're affected with. So we need good records and we need good people management with that as well. So I'm standing here in the University of Illinois in the college of Vet medicine and this is the quarantine, or the isolation unit, of the hospital. And we're not expecting every farm, were not asking every farm to have quarantine unit as exquisite as this, but this unit is set up to teach us some of the principles of biosecurity and biocontainment. It's really a series of rooms. And when we have an animal that comes into the hospital that has a contagious disease, or we suspect a contagious disease, then the animal gets placed into isolation. And why do we do that? We're doing that because the pathogens, a lot of infectious diseases, in the process of the disease, in the pathology of the disease, the organisms are in some way looking to proliferate themselves. So very often an animal with a contagious disease is excreting those pathogens at increased volumes. So an animal with respiratory disease, for instance, by coughing and by breathing, and breathing out respiratory pathogens. So therefore, animals in the same air space might contract those pathogens into their own respiratory tract. Similarly with intestinal disease, an animal with an intestinal infection very often might have diarrhea. The diarrhea is of high volume and is very watery, and that could contaminate an environment very, very quickly, and therefore be a source of exposure to other animals. So isolation, separating of that infected animal, away from the other animals is an important part of our biosecurity procedures. And each of these rooms is designed to be independent from any other animal in the hospital. You can see that they are, as a geographical separation that comes with that. So, you might, on a premises, have a quarantine facility. Or your own hospital pens, which are separated from the other animals. So it's good to have a hospital area where all of the sick animals are taken to, even within that hospital area, to have separate pens. You don't want to spread disease around your hospital pens. It's really important to separate diseased animals. Particularly those ones with infectious disease away from the other animals on your premises. That also means not only do they become a less likely source of contagion, but they also can get better care. So you can design all of your care around those particular animals. We talked about one element of efficiency in our production system is having animals at the same stage of production in a particular facility, so we can feed them the same, we can house them the same, because their needs are the same. It's true for efficiency that having all the sick animals in one area of the farm is also useful. That also means that you can order your day, so not only is disease spread from animal to animal by direct contact, or by contact with the body fluid that has a high amount of those agents. Contact with the feces or contact with the air in which contains those respiratoral pathogens. But disease can also be spread by people as well. So in this facility every time that a person goes into this individual room they will have their own hygiene procedures. They'll put on a different set of clothes. They'll wear different footwear. They'll wear a set of gloves. And that set of materials, once they've handled that animal, won't leave that area. It'll be put into a biocontainment bag within that particular area and that will be removed from that facility without ever coming out and being in contact with any other animal. So people become a really, really important source of infection. Making sure that during infectious disease and outbreak, people movement is very carefully controlled is a very important part of bio security. For instance, let's say you have a group of healthy animals and you have a sick animal. Doing something as simple as handling the sick animal last Will help you prevent spread of the disease between animals. It's sometimes easy to come into the morning for your morning duties, and to want to take care of the sick animal first. But the trouble is, once you've handled that animal, if the disease is transmitted through the feces, picking up some of those feces on your hands or your boots, and that as you go and treat all the other animals spreading that disease. So by having those animals in a particular area you can also even allocate a person just to look after the hospital, or we can make sure that in our duties, the sick animals are treated last that morning or for that day as well. So, the purpose of showing you this exquisite isolation facility and quarantine facility at the College of Veterinary Medicine was not to encourage you that on your particular premises or farm that you should set up such an isolation facility. It's to show you that principles at biosecurity, how important it is to institute processes and procedures which stop the spread of pathogens between animals. So, here we have an animal in a individual pen, and people putting on different clothes, maybe even showering, wearing gloves, wearing boots, to stop the spread of disease between individual rooms. But we also want to think about, on your particular premises, or the premises you're involved, how do you stop disease, getting onto that premises? What can we do as far as stopping at getting into a particular region? And all of those are important in protecting the health and sustainability of our food supply. [MUSIC]
