Background and aim:
Denmark is a world-wide leading country for the export of swine abroad: Annually 12 mio pigs (nucleus pigs, breeding sows, slaughter pigs and carcasses) are being exported to all continents of the world. The basis of this success is the fact that ALL Danish pig-farms cooperate in an organization (SEGES) that takes care of the health monitoring of the pigs at the farms. At any given moment SEGES knows which disease is present or absent on each individual farm. If a country, e.g. Russia, needs breeding sows, say 8.000 heads, of a certain health status, the SEGES organization knows exactly from which farms the breeding sows can be collected. Next days the pigs are collected and put on transport to Russia. This system, the Danish SPF (Specific Pathogen Free) system, is supported by ELISA-testing tot asses the status for the various diseases. However, the export is growing double digit annually and the testing increases to numbers which cannot be addressed in the classical way.

Methods:
Biovet started an evaluation project back in 2016/2017 in order to put all relevant ELISA tests on a MAGPIX® multiplexed system and …….

Results:
…… after ten-thousands of equivalence tests it became clear that the desired specificity and sensitivity of the multiplexed tests was even better than the individual ELISA tests. The SEGES organization implemented
the system in their testing lab, and 3 MAGPIX® machines operate daily to get the ever growing numbers of blood-samples tested, with good success. Each year one extra test is added to the multiplex.

Conclusion:
This project shows that very classical ELISA tests easily can be converted to multiplexed tests with enhanced test-characteristics. To such an extent that increases of numbers of tests can easily be run in the same easy setup of single ELISA’s. Currently, Biovet is expanding its international network of labs that can support health monitoring of pigs in general, in order to offer the same good level of testing everywhere were increasing numbers of animals are needed to feed the growing world-population.