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Animal welfare is of increasing public interest, and the pig industry in particular is subject to much attention. The aim of this study was to identify and compare areas of animal welfare concern for commercial pigs in four different production stages: (1) gestating sows and gilts; (2) lactating sows; (3) piglets; and (4) weaner-to-finisher pigs. One welfare assessment protocol was developed for each stage, comprising of between 20 and 29 animal welfare measures including resource-, management- and animal-based ones. Twenty-one Danish farms were visited once between January 2015 and February 2016 in a cross-sectional design. Experts (n = 26; advisors, scientists and animal welfare controllers) assessed the severity of the outcome measures. This was combined with the on-farm prevalence of each measure and the outcome was used to calculate areas of concern, defined as measures where the median of all farms fell below the value defined as ‘acceptable welfare.’ Between five and seven areas of concern were identified for each production stage. With the exception of carpal lesions in piglets, all areas of concern were resource- and management-based and mainly related to housing, with inadequate available space and the floor type in the resting area being overall concerns across all production stages. This means that animal-based measures were largely unaffected by perceived deficits in resource-based measures. Great variation existed for the majority of measures identified as areas of concern, demonstrating that achieving a high welfare score is possible in the Danish system.

The faecal egg count reduction test (FECRT) remains the method of choice for establishing the efficacy of anthelmintic compounds in the field, including the diagnosis of anthelmintic resistance. We present a guideline for improving the standardization and performance of the FECRT that has four sections. In the first section, we address the major issues relevant to experimental design, choice of faecal egg count (FEC) method, statistical analysis, and interpretation of the FECRT results. In the second section, we make a series of general recommendations that are applicable across all animals addressed in this guideline. In the third section, we provide separate guidance details for cattle, small ruminants (sheep and goats), horses and pigs to address the issues that are specific to the different animal types. Finally, we provide overviews of the specific details required to conduct an FECRT for each of the different host species. To address the issues of statistical power vs. practicality, we also provide two separate options for each animal species; (i) a version designed to detect small changes in efficacy that is intended for use in scientific studies, and (ii) a less resource-intensive version intended for routine use by veterinarians and livestock owners to detect larger changes in efficacy. Compared to the previous FECRT recommendations, four important differences are noted. First, it is now generally recommended to perform the FECRT based on pre- and post-treatment FEC of the same animals (paired study design), rather than on post-treatment FEC of both treated and untreated (control) animals (unpaired study design). Second, instead of requiring a minimum mean FEC (expressed in eggs per gram (EPG)) of the group to be tested, the new requirement is for a minimum total number of eggs to be counted under the microscope (cumulative number of eggs counted before the application of a conversion factor). Third, we provide flexibility in the required size of the treatment group by presenting three separate options that depend on the (expected) number of eggs counted. Finally, these guidelines address all major livestock species, and the thresholds for defining reduced efficacy are adapted and aligned to host species, anthelmintic drug and parasite species. In conclusion, these new guidelines provide improved methodology and standardization of the FECRT for all major livestock species.

Antigen test kits have been used extensively as a screening tool during the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). While it is generally expected that taking samples for analysis with PCR testing gives more reliable results than using antigen test kits, the overall sensitivity and specificity of the two protocols in the field have not yet been estimated without assuming that the PCR test constitutes a gold standard. We use latent class models to estimate the in situ performance of both PCR and antigen testing, using data from the Danish national registries. The results are based on 240,000 paired tests results sub-selected from the 55 million test results that were obtained in Denmark during the period from February 2021 until June 2021. We found that the specificity of both tests is very high in our data sample (>99.7%), while the sensitivity of PCR sampling was estimated to be 95.7% (95% CI: 92.8-98.4%) and that of the antigen test kits used in Denmark over the study period was estimated at 53.8% (95% CI: 49.8-57.9%). Our findings can be used as supplementary information for consideration when implementing serial testing strategies that employ a confirmatory PCR sample following a positive result from an antigen test kit, such as the policy used in Denmark. We note that while this strategy reduces the number of false positives associated with antigen test screening, it also increases the false negatives. We demonstrate that the balance of trading false positives for false negatives only favours the use of serial testing when the expected true prevalence is low. Our results contain substantial uncertainty in the estimates for sensitivity due to the relatively small number of positive test results over this period: validation of our findings in a population with higher prevalence would therefore be highly relevant for future work.