Colt Knight: 00:27
Well, are you ready to kick this gig? Sure. Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. Today, I have a special guest, Dr. Jacqueline Adinoldooth from The Ohio State University.
Colt Knight: 00:48
And you’re gonna have to explain to me why we have to say The Ohio State University. Why can’t it just be Ohio State University?
Jacqueline Nolting: 00:57
Well, our university patented the “the,” and so it’s just a rule now, part of our trademark. So the “the” is part of the name.
Colt Knight: 01:09
Trademark “the”?
Jacqueline Nolting: 01:11
I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t help there.
Jacqueline Nolting: 01:16
I’m sure it’s just how that happens.
Colt Knight: 01:17
A little trademark.
Jacqueline Nolting: 01:19
Right. Anyway,
Colt Knight: 01:23
Jacqueline is a pig person, much like myself. And together, we are working on a USDA project to help prepare for African swine fever, prevent African swine fever from making landfall here in the US and spreading if it does happen to get here. So we’re gonna talk about that a little bit. But first, we would like to get to know Jacqueline. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, where you came from, and how did you get into agriculture?
Colt Knight: 01:59
Did you start off in agriculture, or did you come from the outside?
Jacqueline Nolting: 02:03
No. I grew up on a small hobby farm in central Ohio, so about an hour north of Columbus. And we had everything except pigs, essentially, when I was growing up. So horses, cattle, sheep, rabbits, chickens. And so I grew up in 4-H and FFA.
Jacqueline Nolting: 02:24
I was extremely involved in both of those organizations. Did about every CDE you can do in FFA, was a chapter officer and a state FFA officer in the state of Ohio. And then really, just growing up on the farm and with the animals, I really wanted to be a large animal veterinarian, is what I thought. But then I started to really have a passion come alive in ag ed during my time in FFA. And so
Colt Knight: 02:52
Uncommon theme. Right. Guests. Okay. I was gonna be a veterinarian.
Jacqueline Nolting: 02:56
Right.
Colt Knight: 02:57
I decided, no. I don’t wanna be a veterinarian.
Jacqueline Nolting: 02:59
Yeah. So I went to Ohio State and was in the animal science department. Started working in a research laboratory when I was a second-year animal science student, still thinking I wanted to be on the vet trajectory, and just fell in love with research. So throughout my undergrad time working in the laboratory and in animal science, I really decided that I could be involved in animal health and not be a veterinarian. And so I started working in another lab in the Department of Veterinary Preventive Medicine when I graduated with my bachelor’s degree.
Jacqueline Nolting: 03:41
And after a short time, I started a master’s degree while I was working in that lab. We study influenza A viruses. At that time, it was just wild birds. In 2009, as a result of the influenza pandemic, we started doing surveillance in pigs. So that was my introduction to pigs beyond, you know, animal science basic classes and an undergrad program.
Jacqueline Nolting: 04:05
I really got introduced to pigs in 2009 when we started doing surveillance for influenza.
Colt Knight: 04:11
But you grew up similar to my situation.
Jacqueline Nolting: 04:15
Okay.
Colt Knight: 04:15
We had a small hobby slash petting zoo type of farm, and we had at least one of everything at one point. And so I wanted to ask you, what was the craziest or strangest animal that you had growing up? I have a story on my
Jacqueline Nolting: 04:35
side.
Colt Knight: 04:36
I wanna hear
Jacqueline Nolting: 04:37
Hear mine. I think the strangest animal was not, it was a sheep. And it wasn’t that that species is strange, but it was one of the first times that I was pulling a lamb on my own. I was involved in that, you know, when my parents would pull the lambs, and I was involved. And it was a bit of a traumatic experience because I was trying for a long time to pull this lamb.
Jacqueline Nolting: 05:05
My mom kept yelling that I wasn’t getting the head. And eventually, we just decided, like, we needed to pull it, and it turned out to be a headless lamb. And so it was a very reconfigured animal, but it was, you know, while it was before it was delivered, it was still alive. I could pinch the legs and it would move things. So it was just when it was pulled and then didn’t have oxygen anymore that it perished.
Jacqueline Nolting: 05:33
But that was probably the strangest thing that we had, a headless lamb.
Colt Knight: 05:37
I guess my first lamb in West Virginia, we had these, like, pop-up flea markets.
Jacqueline Nolting: 05:45
Okay.
Colt Knight: 05:45
Sometimes they’d just be on the side of the road.
Jacqueline Nolting: 05:47
Popped.
Colt Knight: 05:48
And I remember we were driving to a horse show one time, and on the side of the road was a car with the trunk open, and they were selling a little black-fleeced lamb. And my dad purchased it.
Jacqueline Nolting: 06:04
Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 06:05
Brought it to our stable. And we had a basset hound that we had rescued there, and we put the basset hound and the lamb together to be buddies.
Jacqueline Nolting: 06:16
Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 06:17
And the lamb loved the basset hound, but the basset hound did not like the lamb. And as the lamb got older, the basset hound would lead the lamb off, like, a couple miles and then just ditch it.
Jacqueline Nolting: 06:34
Oh, wow.
Colt Knight: 06:35
And then the basset hound would run back to the barn, just leave the lamb wherever.
Jacqueline Nolting: 06:40
Mhmm. Did the lamb make its way back?
Colt Knight: 06:42
We’d have to go find the lamb, or somebody would call us and tell us. But yeah, no, man. That was just, I thought that was, it was. But the basset hound just did not like the lamb, Kevin. And as the lamb got older and older, it began to eat the wires on the horse trailer, igniter off the grill. We got rid of it before it reached full size.
Jacqueline Nolting: 07:04
Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 07:05
That was really the only lamb I had growing up until I got into graduate school, you know? And then we started, I was part of the, for that, a bunch of sheep and goats. But I think growing up, the weirdest animal that we had was a coatimundi.
Jacqueline Nolting: 07:24
Gosh. What is that?
Colt Knight: 07:26
It’s like a South American, Central American raccoon type deal. They’re colored similarly. They’re not as big and fat as a raccoon. They’ve got more prehensile arms and things, but his name was Roscoe. And he loved to dig in your pockets and take out cash.
Jacqueline Nolting: 07:47
Oh.
Colt Knight: 07:48
So if he could smell, like, dollar bills or whatever, he would sneak them out. He’d come and sit in your lap, and it was like a squirrel, you know, climbing all over. And he would dig out that money from your pocket to take it from you.
Jacqueline Nolting: 08:02
Oh, wow. He sounds like the pet monkey on Aladdin.
Colt Knight: 08:07
Yeah. Right? Very similar.
Jacqueline Nolting: 08:08
Goes and pickpockets.
Colt Knight: 08:09
As he got older, we didn’t castrate him, and then he just got real mean.
Jacqueline Nolting: 08:13
Oh.
Colt Knight: 08:13
You know? And so we had to donate him to, like, a wildlife shelter type place where he was part of the zoo.
Jacqueline Nolting: 08:22
Okay.
Colt Knight: 08:23
But yeah, he was really fun till he got older and mature.
Jacqueline Nolting: 08:28
Sure. He
Colt Knight: 08:28
Just, I’ve still got scars from where he would, one time he bit me on my right thumb, and I went to sling him away, you know,
Jacqueline Nolting: 08:38
That’s brutal.
Colt Knight: 08:38
Get off of me. And then as he flew through the air, he didn’t let go, and his teeth just opened up my thumb for about a two-inch gap. It got to where it was hard to feed him. He just got so, oh, so mean.
Colt Knight: 08:51
So not everything is a pet.
Jacqueline Nolting: 08:53
Right. Yeah. Absolutely.
Colt Knight: 08:58
So you went from hobby farm to undergraduate to graduate school. Mhmm. Here not too long ago, you took a job as faculty at Ohio State. What’s your actual title?
Jacqueline Nolting: 09:15
So I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Veterinary Preventive Medicine in the College of Vet Med at Ohio State, and also assistant, or excuse me, animal health and biosecurity extension specialist.
Colt Knight: 09:32
So you’re an extension agent. Do you do any teaching or research on campus?
Jacqueline Nolting: 09:37
I do. So I have a 50% extension appointment. So half of my time is spent doing extension, and then 20% of my time is spent doing research. So I do biological science research and social science research, both. I have a research program.
Jacqueline Nolting: 09:55
We study influenza viruses in wild birds and mammals. So mostly right now, you know, looking for highly pathogenic avian influenza in those species, but then also the low pathogenic viruses as well. And I also have a small role in a large West Nile virus project. And so doing that for research, and then I have some teaching appointment. So I teach veterinary students and also graduate students in the department of our College of Vet Med.
Colt Knight: 10:27
Very good. I know one of your extension programs is the Swientist. Yes. And I think that’s an excellent program. And I’d love to hear more about what Swientist is and how you got started with that and how it’s evolved over time and how it’s kind of transitioning into what we’re doing now with African swine fever.
Jacqueline Nolting: 10:49
Sure. So the Swientist program started in, the term Swientist, I think, we came up with in 2017 while I was a PhD student. Yeah. While I was a PhD student.
Colt Knight: 11:03
Snapchat GPT to come.
Jacqueline Nolting: 11:04
It was. It was. And it was just by accident. Actually, we were trying to come up with a logo for this education program. And we were with our medical illustrator in his office and just having a conversation.
Jacqueline Nolting: 11:19
And said swine and scientist. And he said, “Did you say swine or scientist or swine test?” And we said, “Oh, that really fits.” And so that term was coined in 2017 just by accident. But the program was first funded in 2015 by the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists.
Jacqueline Nolting: 11:44
And they received their money from CDC and USDA and National FFA and 4-H, a big, you know, group of agencies that had put money in the pot to start education for youth swine exhibitors. And that was needed because in really 2011 through 2013, we saw a big increase in the number of cases of influenza virus that spilled over from fairs, or excuse me, from pigs to kids at county fairs. And so there was a lot of public health response during that time because, you know, we have these pigs, you know, giving kids flu, or the kids, I guess, being exposed by pigs at fairs. And so rather than, you know, shutting down shows, which is what a lot of the public health response seemed to be, like, this is a risk, then we should just get rid of the risk. But for a lot of us in agriculture, we understand the value of having fairs and having shows and the educational value that provides.
Jacqueline Nolting: 12:56
And so I
Colt Knight: 12:57
think it provides not just educational value, but it builds character
Jacqueline Nolting: 13:02
Oh, absolutely.
Colt Knight: 13:03
in students. And they go on to become leaders. Mhmm. So just completely turning them off seems like a harsh way of dealing with things.
Jacqueline Nolting: 13:15
Absolutely. And so the alternative to canceling shows was to provide additional education. And so the funding came, and we were able to secure funding. It started as a pilot. We did just education in a couple of counties in Ohio and then has grown from there.
Jacqueline Nolting: 13:36
So now we work a lot with NJSA, so the National Junior Swine Association, and Team Purebred, who host national-level jackpot shows all over the country. We also work with a lot of state jackpot shows and regional shows, also county fairs. We do a lot of education in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways. So we use experiential learning, so trying to provide hands-on experiences, hands-on activities for all the lessons that we do with kids, do that in a variety of ways.
Jacqueline Nolting: 14:16
Sometimes it’s a workshop. Sometimes we’re at a show and, you know, we’re just there all day, and kids, when they have a moment, they come over and they do our activity. That’s a pretty, we’ve become pretty popular with the kids who are showing regularly. They see us a lot for years, and now they’ve seen us. And we try
Colt Knight: 14:36
to, an extension along with us.
Jacqueline Nolting: 14:37
a lot of different things.
Colt Knight: 14:38
The kids that I started with in 4-H, mhmm, have now become my college students. Oh. And several of them have since graduated from college. Yeah.
Jacqueline Nolting: 14:51
It’s fun to see the kids growing up. Also, I think that it’s really rewarding to see when those kids, like you said, that they’re growing up through your programs, that then you see them start teaching the younger generation.
Colt Knight: 15:06
I was at a fair last year, and a young lady that’s leading a bunch of elementary students around came up to me and introduced herself and said, “You probably don’t remember me, but I was in your class, and you inspired me to enter agricultural education type fields.” And now she is teaching kids. And so I thought that was pretty impactful on me when I
Jacqueline Nolting: 15:31
heard
Colt Knight: 15:31
that.
Jacqueline Nolting: 15:32
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that that’s a good reminder of the impact that you have. Sometimes the work that we do doesn’t, you kinda wonder what the impact really is, or how do you value it. But when you hear stories like that, and helping people make these life decisions and finding their passions, I think, is the most rewarding part of the work that we do.
Colt Knight: 15:55
Absolutely. And so you’ve done all this work with biosecurity and fairs and the youth and the National Pork Board. Did you? I think that, is that how we met, is through the National Pork Board Swine Education and Outreach?
Jacqueline Nolting: 16:15
It is.
Colt Knight: 16:15
Okay. Mhmm. I can’t keep up with all the meetings and things that I go to anymore. But you heard about me there, and I heard about you there. And you had this opportunity pop up with the USDA about educating youth and folks on African swine fever, kind of on the model you have as Swientist.
Colt Knight: 16:41
Right?
Jacqueline Nolting: 16:42
Yeah. That’s correct. Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 16:44
And so to our folks that are listening that aren’t familiar with African swine fever, it is a global pandemic epizootic-type disease. And, like, it has wiped out entire countries’ worth of swine population. And so it’s a real-deal concern. And probably, is it the number one disease concern for swine if it comes into the US?
Jacqueline Nolting: 17:15
I would say yes. African swine fever, and probably classical swine fever is up there as well. But definitely, it would be devastating to swine in the US if African swine fever were to come here.
Colt Knight: 17:28
Yeah. And we had a swine flu come through, and it crossed over to the human population. What was it, like, ten, fifteen years ago?
Jacqueline Nolting: 17:35
Yeah. So the 2009 H1N1 pandemic
Colt Knight: 17:39
Yeah.
Jacqueline Nolting: 17:39
of influenza. Yeah. It was associated with swine. And actually, that virus, it was, you know, it had had parts of it in pigs. It was a reassortment virus, pigs and birds and humans. And then it got into the human population, and then it spilled back over into the US swine herd, still circulating in the US swine herd and people still now.
Colt Knight: 18:01
So prevention, trying to keep it away from the US is one of our number one concerns. But we also realize that if it does get here, we wanna prepare early and educate folks on how to not spread it
Jacqueline Nolting: 18:14
Absolutely.
Colt Knight: 18:15
if it does happen. Mhmm. And so our grant is kind of focused on that education.
Jacqueline Nolting: 18:23
Yep. Absolutely. So just trying to help producers understand a little bit more about what this virus means and what it would look like if it were to come to the US, what kind of, you know, stop movements and what kind of policies would be in place to try to control the disease before it wiped out our swine herd.
Colt Knight: 18:44
And so in Maine, my listeners probably aren’t familiar with just how large of a scale the swine industry is. So our largest producer might have 100 or 200 pigs. Mhmm. Whereas if we were to go to Iowa, there might be a county with, what, a million or more pigs?
Jacqueline Nolting: 19:07
I would say.
Colt Knight: 19:08
With barns that have 45,000, 100,000 within just the same complex on-farm. And so if that disease was to creep in there, we’re talking about losing hundreds of thousands of pigs almost overnight.
Jacqueline Nolting: 19:25
Yeah. Absolutely.
Colt Knight: 19:26
And we’d have to deal with that fallout. Plus, it hits the food. I mean, we eat pork, and we’re talking about a serious hit in the food supply.
Jacqueline Nolting: 19:37
Yeah. Absolutely.
Colt Knight: 19:38
And just the potential health crossover issues.
Jacqueline Nolting: 19:41
Right. And so, yeah, there’s, you know, approximately 76,000,000 pigs in the United States. And so even if just a fraction of those were to become infected or need to be culled because they were in a control zone, then it could be really detrimental to our food supply and all those who are raising pigs as well.
Colt Knight: 20:02
Yep. So now that we know how dangerous it is, mhmm, what should we be doing, especially as folks that are traveling back and forth to livestock fairs? Mhmm. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 20:13
We’ve kinda wound down on those in Maine now, but, you know, spring is just around the corner, and we’ll be kicking back off again. What should we do to prevent the transfer of disease back and forth from fairs to farms and farms to fairs and so on and so forth. And for the last two years in a row, I have actually dealt with pig producers in Maine that have brought diseases back to their farm from fairs and had pretty catastrophic, you know, loss. Either they had to put down their feeder pigs because they contracted something, or their sows lost their reproductive function and they didn’t have their pigs that year.
Jacqueline Nolting: 20:58
Yeah. So even if it’s non-African swine fever, like you just said, there’s plenty of other diseases that we are passing around as we move pigs. And so there are, it’s
Colt Knight: 21:09
not just a what if.
Jacqueline Nolting: 21:10
No. It’s just a
Colt Knight: 21:11
what disease are we dealing
Jacqueline Nolting: 21:12
with this time. Right. Absolutely. And so, you know, if we’re thinking about, you know, spread of African swine fever, first, it would have to get to the US. And if we’re thinking about how are we gonna stop that from coming to the US, then international travel, because a lot of parts of the world do have African swine fever, it got as close to the US as the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Jacqueline Nolting: 21:37
And so if we’re traveling abroad, then we can bring it back on our shoes, on our clothes if we were to be on a pig farm or around feral swine. You know, a lot of the European countries, it’s really endemic in the feral pigs. And so thinking about that, like, if we are swine owners, if we have a pig farm at home and we travel abroad, then making sure that our shoes, our clothing is not something that we would use in our barn that we’ve worn overseas. There’s a lot of restrictions on pork products. So African swine fever has a lot of longevity in even cooked pork products.
Jacqueline Nolting: 22:21
So we can have either, like, cooked pepperonis and sausages or frozen pork products that can last for months and make a pig sick. And so another area at home that we wanna avoid is if we’re garbage feeding, making sure that there’s no pork product making it into the diets of our hogs because that is, if it’s been missed, if there were some infected pork product and there’s some virus in those products that are fed to a live animal, then the disease can infect that animal. Mhmm. But if we’re just thinking about, like, disease in general, or once, if African swine fever were here and we were trying to live with it, then when we’re going from shows or bringing new pigs to the farm, we wanna do isolation. And so we definitely want to keep either new pigs or pigs that have traveled separate from our herd at home for at least a minimum of seven days.
Jacqueline Nolting: 23:20
A little longer would be better.
Colt Knight: 23:21
Thirty would be ideal.
Jacqueline Nolting: 23:22
Thirty would be ideal. Absolutely. But I think that, you know, especially if you have some of the show schedules and things, you know, if we say thirty days, it just, it can’t happen. So, you know, keeping them apart for at least a week.
Jacqueline Nolting: 23:39
And that means complete isolation if possible. So separate buildings, if that’s possible.
Colt Knight: 23:45
What, let’s say you have open-air type facilities. How far away should those be? Like, if we’ve got open pens
Jacqueline Nolting: 23:53
Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 23:53
but we can move our fair pigs to this open pen and keep our breeding stock in this site. How far should they be?
Jacqueline Nolting: 24:01
As far away as possible. I think that there’s, you know, have been, Monse Tormello, she’s done work in Minnesota that viruses end up in the air, and they can travel for miles in the correct airstreams and with big fans and things, you know, also that is used in tunnel ventilation. So really, just getting them as far apart as possible. I don’t know that there’s a number that we’re gonna say, you gotta be 20 feet. I think eliminating direct contact.
Jacqueline Nolting: 24:34
So we don’t want pigs to be in adjacent pens where they can touch noses. Yeah. We want them to be, you know, not able to have that direct contact. And then we also have to think about when we’re doing chores, that we’re taking care of our healthy animals, or the animals that didn’t go to the show, first, with separate feed scoops, separate bins of feed, you know, different waterers, different feeders than the sick ones. Because if we dealt with the sick ones, or the ones that might have been exposed somewhere at a fair first, and then we go to the healthy, we could just drag that disease with us.
Jacqueline Nolting: 25:10
So, you know, we wanna have separate feeders, separate waterers, you know, the feed in separate places with different feed scoops so that we’re not transmitting disease between those two groups of animals that are isolated.
Colt Knight: 25:23
Yeah. Very good. We had an episode just on biosecurity
Jacqueline Nolting: 25:26
practices. Perfect.
Colt Knight: 25:28
And, you know, this is what Jacqueline’s talking about right now is the real-world application of those biosecurity practices. And I have heard from producers before, because we’ve had some other grants that dealt with biosecurity. The small-scale producers think they’re too small for biosecurity to be an issue, or they’re too small to practice biosecurity. And I think that’s a misnomer. You can practice biosecurity practices if you just have one animal.
Jacqueline Nolting: 25:54
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I think that cleaning and disinfection is extremely important. And, you know, those are two separate things. And I think we could, you could probably do an entire podcast episode on just cleaning and disinfection.
Jacqueline Nolting: 26:09
You probably have because it’s, there’s a lot.
Colt Knight: 26:12
You mentioned in one of your surveys that a certain, only a certain percentage of folks coming back from a fair disinfected after they cleaned.
Jacqueline Nolting: 26:24
Right.
Colt Knight: 26:24
And a percentage of those that said they disinfected didn’t even use a real disinfectant.
Jacqueline Nolting: 26:30
Absolutely.
Colt Knight: 26:31
And so what is a good disinfectant that we can use so far?
Jacqueline Nolting: 26:39
So it’s difficult to have one that you say is the best for everybody. Right? A lot of these are kinda site-specific or if it’s a specific pathogen. So, like, if we’re, you know, just thinking in general terms, bleach is something that, diluted bleach product is something that is really easy to get, and people, you know, it’s cost-effective to pick up bleach. We wanna dilute it pretty frequently.
Jacqueline Nolting: 27:10
We don’t wanna just dilute it once and then it’s in our barn for a month. It’s not gonna be effective.
Colt Knight: 27:15
It breaks down pretty quickly.
Jacqueline Nolting: 27:17
It does. And organic material breaks it down. And so if you haven’t done cleaning first and you haven’t washed off all that manure and dirt and sawdust, the bleach isn’t gonna be effective.
Colt Knight: 27:28
I found people will take their boot washes, and they’ll mix up their bleach solution. Mhmm. And they leave it there till it evaporates. Yeah. And it’s probably not very good after a day or so.
Jacqueline Nolting: 27:39
Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So bleach, you know, also, if you have an aluminum trailer, the bleach is gonna pit that aluminum, and then that’s just, pathogens are gonna hide in those pits. So, you know, there are a variety of other products.
Jacqueline Nolting: 27:55
There’s hydrogen peroxide products. That’s what I really like to use. And a lot of times if we’re doing education, we’ll use a hydrogen peroxide product. Intervention is one that is marketed for animal agriculture use. Certainly don’t need to have that name brand of product, but they have wipes and they also have, you know, gallon jugs, or they have that you can dilute, or smaller quantity volumes.
Jacqueline Nolting: 28:21
And so a hydrogen peroxide product is gonna be one that would be effective for African swine fever. If we’re just using standard household bleach, like a one-to-ten dilution, that’s not going to be effective for African swine fever. We would need to have a stronger chlorine bleach product. It would be more like pool shock.
Colt Knight: 28:41
Yeah.
Jacqueline Nolting: 28:42
That would be kind of the alternative if you’re using a bleach product. But the hydrogen peroxide products are effective for African swine fever and a wide variety of other pathogens.
Colt Knight: 28:53
What about some of our commercial agricultural disinfectants like Virkon X or Tek-Trol II or FAM30?
Jacqueline Nolting: 29:02
So some of those are effective for African swine fever, but not all of them. And so it’s definitely something that, when you’re choosing a disinfectant, you wanna look at the labels to see what pathogens they are effective for. You know, another issue with disinfectants is our contact time. And so it’s really important that we’re looking for the proper contact time when we’re using disinfectants.
Colt Knight: 29:26
So
Jacqueline Nolting: 29:29
I think that beyond cleaning and disinfection, we saw that in that survey that you had mentioned, a lot of people are writing things down as disinfectants that really are detergents or are soaps. And those are really important, and they are gonna get rid of, you know, 95% or more of the pathogens if we’re cleaning properly. So if we’re using a detergent, we’re scrubbing, getting rid of all that visible debris, then we’re gonna get rid of a lot of pathogens, but not all of them. And so
Colt Knight: 30:02
because you have to remove the organic matter so that we can actually disinfect the surface.
Jacqueline Nolting: 30:07
Absolutely. And we’re gonna wanna make sure that, when we’re doing that cleaning, that we’re rinsing too because a lot of that detergent product would inactivate our disinfectant as well.
Colt Knight: 30:15
I was gonna mention that because a lot of folks will, like, mix bleach in their mop water, mhmm, cleaning solution, and they actually cancel each other out.
Jacqueline Nolting: 30:23
Yeah. Absolutely. We had a problem in the lab. This was several years ago, but we had a student, and we always used Joy dish soap in the laboratory. And they thought they, and we would then do a bleach step to
Colt Knight: 30:39
Universities… with Joy.
Jacqueline Nolting: 30:42
Is that what you used too?
Colt Knight: 30:43
Because, like, every university I’ve ever been at used to get those boxes of Joy.
Jacqueline Nolting: 30:48
Yeah. So we had a student that was trying to save time, or reduce her workload probably, and mixed a huge sink full of Joy and then just poured in a bunch of bleach. And the chemicals mixing caused just kind of a cloud of, I’m sure, toxic gas. And she was not able to breathe, and it was kind of a bad situation there for a few moments. And so definitely mixing detergent and bleach, not a good idea.
Colt Knight: 31:19
I remember when I was a kid, ammonia was still a really popular
Jacqueline Nolting: 31:22
Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 31:22
cleaning solution. And we always had to, we always learned about how ammonia and bleach created chlorine gas
Jacqueline Nolting: 31:28
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 31:29
which will kill you. You don’t really hear about that anymore. I don’t think anybody actually puts much ammonia in stuff these days.
Jacqueline Nolting: 31:36
No. I don’t think so.
Colt Knight: 31:37
They used to be a real concern when I was a kid. Well, Jacqueline, is there anything else you’d like to tell us about African swine fever? Or
Jacqueline Nolting: 31:47
I think just, you know, one last thing that I think is really important for your listeners to know is that African swine fever is not zoonotic. So that means that it is not going to spread from pigs to people. It doesn’t infect humans. And so it’s not something that we need to be concerned about from a human health perspective, but definitely for our pigs. And it’s going to, if it were to come here, it would impact human health because of our protein source.
Jacqueline Nolting: 32:14
Right? When there are not pork products to eat, or because the pigs are dead, then, you know, that’s a detriment to human health.
Colt Knight: 32:21
Right. Now chicken is number one protein, but pork and beef are tight for down to, mhmm, two. So we eat a lot of pork.
Jacqueline Nolting: 32:28
We do. Absolutely.
Colt Knight: 32:31
Do you have anything you’d like to plug on the Swientist side or resources available for that?
Jacqueline Nolting: 32:37
Yeah. So we have a website that has resources available for educators. So there’s curriculum available for ag educators, both high school, middle school ag teachers, or extension educators. So it’s go.osu.edu/swientist. So you can check us out there.
Colt Knight: 32:58
And we’ll click that in the description so you can find it. Perfect.
Jacqueline Nolting: 33:02
So, and then, you know, we’re gonna be having our day-long event in January. So I’m sure you can share more about that as we’re getting all those details together as well, to just share more about swine husbandry and nutrition and biosecurity and African swine fever and a little more about SPS plans, so those secure pork supply plans, to really help producers be prepared for disease outbreaks and to try to minimize, you know, the detriment to animal health.
Colt Knight: 33:37
Well, thanks, Jacqueline, for joining us. I’d like to remind the listeners, if you have questions, comments, I think we sufficiently covered it. Okay.