Title: Classical swine fever (Hog cholera) | The Pig Site
Headings: Classical swine fever (Hog cholera)
Classical swine fever (Hog cholera)
Background and history
Clinical signs
Acute disease
Sub-acute disease
Chronic and aberrant disease and persistent infection
Diagnosis
Post-mortem
Causes
Prevention
Vaccination
National eradication programmes
National preventative programmes
On-farm precautions
Treatment
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Content: The laboratory should be able to carry out rapid tests and let you know the diagnosis on the same day they receive the samples. A quick and fairly accurate test, which has been used for a number of years, is the direct fluorescent antibody test (FAT) carried out on frozen sections of the tonsils or other organs. It can sometimes give false negative results but this can be avoided if a sufficient number of pigs' tonsils are sampled. The CSF virus also cross reacts in the FAT test with bovine virus diarrhoea virus (BVDV) of cattle and the border disease virus (BDV) of sheep, either of which may sometimes infect pigs. These viruses can cause trans-placental infection of unborn piglets in the sow's uterus resulting in infertility and piglet problems similar to those of CSF. Such congenital infection may also result in newborn piglets which are shedding virus and thus infecting other pigs. . Haemorrhaging in bladder of pig with swine fever
The false positive results obtained in an FAT may cause awkward problems if there is a control or eradication policy in force. Specific antibodies against specific antigens of the CSF virus differentiate it from BVDV and BDV. Fortunately, BVDV and BDV are relatively rare infections in pigs kept separately from cattle and sheep.