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 pair of tonsils are two large red patches each about the size of the end half of your thumb or perhaps slightly bigger. See chapter 15 (Swabbing). Do not freeze them but send them packed with ice. Virus is present throughout the body. In addition to the tonsils the next best organs to send are the spleen, kidneys and last few inches of the small intestine (before it meets the large intestine). 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.