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Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health present at the 24th IPVS in Dublin, Ireland
More than 3,500 swine practitioners and scientists from all over the world met for four days to present and discuss swine health management at the 24th International Pig Veterinary Society (IPVS) congress in Dublin last June. Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health (BIAH) was a partner sponsor for the event showing once again its commitment to supporting the swine industry and more importantly also contributing very actively on a rich technical and scientific program with more than 120 posters and a many oral presentations from BIAH colleagues from around the world.
The IPVS delegates had the chance to participate in the different activities organized by Boehringer Ingelheim: meet the experts, biosecurity challenge and the satellite symposium.
Meet the experts at the booth
During this IPVS many delegates attended the sessions at the booth in which several renowned experts received questions from veterinarians and openly discussed topics relevant to their daily work. This idea was developed to benefit from internal and external experts and encourage open and informal sharing between the experts and veterinarians at different congresses. These sessions showed lots of interactions between delegates.
Biosecurity challenge
Veterinarians could participate in a Biosecurity Challenge by identifying in a model scale farm the main risks associated with PRRS control. Numerous interesting discussions happened around the farm between participants, allowing people to see that PRRS control requires good vaccines together with good biosecurity and management practices.
BI Satellite symposium : “Why vaccines feed the world”
BIAH held a Satellite Symposium attended by more than 1,050 delegates. Dr. Cesar Carnicer (Head of Global Marketing swine for BI) proved, in an innovative way, that human demographics (population growth and wealth increase) will create a challenge for the pork production industry as well as a great opportunity to continue growing. Dr. Dennis Dipietre (Knowledge Ventures LLC) explained how precision agriculture concepts: especially looking at populations and not only averages could be applied to swine production and why he believes, that precision is the only future. Furthermore, he stated that disease prevention is the foundation to precision production. Following that, Prof. John Harding (Western college of Veterinary medicine in Canada), shared the present knowledge about genomics applied to infectious disease control and how the future will look in this complex field. In order to develop better tools, animal health companies will have to tailor vaccines to the specific ability to the animals to respond to each antigen.
Yan Hua “Cici” Guo (Head of Marketing, BI China) explained that “The solution is bigger than the bottle” and shared a customer experience to show what “Prevention works” means: BIAH provides innovative world-class vaccines complemented by:
- Professional people with a passion for pigs
- State of the art diagnostics and support from global research facilities
- Tools to evaluate the success of prevention
Finally, Dr. Oliver Duran (Head of Swine Global Technical services at BI) challenged the audience with a simple question: “Are we measuring the right things?”. In his presentation he focused on the fact that most of the time we evaluate a few parameters and often only for the direct benefits (ie. mortality reduction, ADG, FCR, etc…) of those interventions. However, many studies show how BIAH swine vaccines also deliver a wide range of indirect benefits including reduction of shedding, better food safety or animal welfare. Participants at the symposium appreciated how Dr. Duran described different efficacy parameters to evaluate vaccinations and also, innovative ways to visualize production data generated in the lab and in production farms.