166 Effects of excess zinc in drinking water of weaned piglets in a natural viral infection model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) causes significant losses in the Canadian swine industry. Zinc oxide is commonly used to support gut health and the immune system in animals post-weaning, but its digestibility is limited, and its widespread use causes environmental issues. In response to new regulations limiting the use of zinc oxide, finding alternatives has become crucial. This study aimed to test the effect of a zinc-lysine complex offered in water using a natural disease challenge model (NDCM). The study was conducted on five groups of 60 weaned piglets that were monitored to evaluate the effect of zinc-lysine in water. Each group was divided into four pens of 15 piglets, with one control group and two groups receiving 500 ppm (ZnH) and 1000 ppm (ZnVH) of zinc-lysine in water. Treatments lasted 29 days. Feed and water intake were measured. All piglets received conventional feed without additional Zn as a growth factor. Manual weighing was conducted on days 0, 15, 29, and at the end of the nursery phase, with weekly health scores assigned until the end of nursery. Blood samples were also taken on days 15 and 29 from 8 piglets per pen. Statistical analyses were performed using Minitab’s mixed procedure with treatment and sex as fixed effects and group as a random effect. For the 0-29 day period, average daily feed intake was not influenced by treatments. Average daily gain was lower for ZnVH (192 g/day; P=0.005) compared to the control (222 g/day) and ZnH (240 g/day), which did not differ statistically. Feed conversion was higher for ZnVH (1.86) compared to ZnH (1.44; P=0.018), with the control being intermediate (1.67). On day 29, the weight of animals in the ZnH group (13.6 kg) was higher than ZnVH (11.6 kg; P=0.007), with the control group being intermediate (12.9 kg). On days 7 (P=0.045), 15 (P=0.018), and 29 (P=0.044), health scores deteriorated for ZnVH compared to ZnH, which had the best score and did not differ from the control. Finally, on day 29, plasma zinc levels for the ZnVH treatment (2.10 ppm) were higher than for the control (0.613 ppm) and ZnH (1.36 ppm; P< 0.05). The results of the study show that adding zinc-lysine to water can benefit weaned piglets infected with the PRRS virus. However, an excess of zinc appears to lead to toxic effects, compromising piglet health and growth performance. This study shows that zinc-lysine may be an effective alternative to zinc oxide, but the optimal dose of Zn still needs to be fine-tune.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".