Improve Immune Response Through Better Nutrition

Enteric bacterial infections like E. coli and salmonella can be isolated from your nursery. In fact, such bacteria can be found in almost any pig barn by collecting a fecal sample and having it analyzed at a veterinary diagnostic lab. These bacteria often find their way into a herd from the comingling of pigs from multiple sites. 

Adding stressors can take this already present bacteria from dormant to infectious, leading to negative impacts on swine production. These stressors include weaning stress, out-of-feed events where pigs are off of feed for 6 to 12 hours or comingling stress. 

Signs and Impact of Bacterial Infections 

The symptoms of these infections are going to look similar since they are all enteric bacteria. The primary symptoms focus on diarrhea. This will lower feed intake or take pigs off feed, which causes a decrease in important weight gain milestones. With some severe infections, you can even see an increase in mortality, which decreases throughput and challenges the health and wellbeing of your pigs and the financial health of your business. 

Another challenge producers will face is clinical vs. subclinical infections. Clinical symptoms, like diarrhea, are easier to identify and act on. However subclinical disease will be present without showing any obvious signs. The costs of a subclinical infection are real, from loss of performance to labor needed to treat them.  

The Right Trace Minerals Reduce Severity of Bacterial Challenges 

Swine producers can reduce the severity of bacterial infections by supplementing their nutrition and feeding program with proven nutrition, like Zinpro^® zinc. Zinpro zinc plays a role in helping the pig mount a rapid and robust immune response — which will improve performance and increase survivability, ultimately having a positive effect on a producers’ bottom line. Our research has demonstrated that during enteric challenges:  

• Vaccinated pigs fed Zinpro zinc had a 4.5% decrease in mortality compared to vaccinated pigs fed an inorganic zinc  
• Pigs fed Zinpro zinc saw reduced morbidity by 5.4% and mortality by 2.7% when faced with an E. coli challenge 
• Pigs had a more robust immune response to enteric challenge  

Improve Pig Health and Commercial Production with Zinpro 

Feeding the right zinc, Zinpro zinc, can decrease the severity of the bacterial infection by helping pigs mount a more rapid and robust immune response. This will help improve commercial production factors and improve a pork producer’s bottom line. 

Are You Ready to Learn More About Feeding Zinpro Zinc? 

Connect with a Zinpro swine expert near you. 

---