Disease outbreaks are often correlated with increased morbidity and mortality within a population. Swine exposed to a pathogen also suffer from a decrease in growth that may negatively impact long term health and performance. Modeling disease in an experimental setting can include the use of heat stress (Johnson et al., 2020), viral particles (Schweer et al., 2017; Jasper et al., 2020), enteric pathogens (Fabà et al., 2019; Wellington et al., 2019) or bacterial lipopolysaccharide (Andres et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019), a classic immune system stimulant. A recent paper by Rodrigues et al. (2021) performed a meta analysis to determine what factors affect growth rates of pigs exposed to different immune system challenges. Results provide insight into additional influences that affect performance responses to experimental disease challenges.
