This book offers essential information about how to obtain samples for routine clinical and pathological investigations veterinarians habitually follow in pig farms. In addition, a complete and easy-to-perform necropsy procedure is shown. Picture galleries illustrate these procedures in a very easy way to follow. The guide also contains a set of pictures representing the main pathologies veterinarians can find in their practice. The guide is very visual and literature is reduced in order to facilitate the use of the book. This design, together with the book format and binding makes this guide very easy to use in practice by veterinarians and farm workers.

Presentation of the book

The guide is presented in a very handy binding allowing to be used under pig farm conditions. The book is distributed in three parts. First part is dedicated to clinical sampling and is completed with clinical pictures of the main clinical signs of common diseases. Second part describes how to perform a necropsy in a very quick and easy way. Necropsy procedure is splitted in 5 steps and, as a complement, a how to get best samples from histology and microbiology is shown. The last chapter includes a picture collection of common diseases of pigs which readers can use for comparison.

Authors

Marcelo de las Heras

Dr. Marcelo de las Heras graduated in Veterinary Medicine in 1981 and obtained his PhD in 1987. He has been teaching veterinary pathology since 1983 at the University of Zaragoza and currently is a professor of veterinary pathology. He has been the author of several books of necropsy techniques and anatomic pathology in sheep, goats and pigs and published more than 100 papers on scientific journals.

José Antonio García de Jalón

Dr. José A. García de Jalón graduated in Veterinary Medicine in 1979 and obtained his PhD in 1986. He has been teaching veterinary pathology since 1979 in the University of Zaragoza and currently is a professor of veterinary pathology. He has been the author of several books of necropsy techniques and anatomic pathology in sheep, goats and pigs and published more than 110 papers on scientific journals.

Isidoro Pérez Guzmán

Dr. Pérez graduated from the Veterinary Medical School at the University of Zaragoza in 1987. He completed his veterinary studies with a master’s degree in swine production at The Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 1995 and an advanced studies diploma (DEA) in milk production of sows in 2006. He developed his professional experience at the swine technical services of Cooper Zeltia, Pitman-Moore, Mallinkrodt Pharmaceuticals and Schering-Plough until 2006, and afterwards he became the production manager at Grupo Obanos until present.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Identification of clinical signs

3. Picture gallery of pig diseases

4. Sampling for clinical procedures

5. Necropsy step by step

6. Sampling for histopathology studies