Hungarian pig study finds sharp decline in EP-like lung lesions

A newly published Animals study offers a detailed look at enzootic pneumonia-like lung lesions in Hungarian slaughter pigs, and its headline finding is a steep decline over five years. Reviewing 13,499 lungs collected during 174 slaughterhouse examinations from 38 farms between 2018 and 2022, the authors reported that EP-like lesions were present in 25.3% of lungs overall, but prevalence dropped from 57.4% in 2018 to 8.6% in 2022. Mean Madec scores fell in parallel, from 2.7 to 0.3. (mdpi.com)

The study sits within a long-running veterinary effort to use abattoir findings as a window into herd respiratory health. Enzootic pneumonia, most commonly associated with Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae, remains a core component of porcine respiratory disease complex worldwide. Because infection can be chronic, subclinical, and shaped by coinfections, slaughterhouse lesion scoring has become a widely used surveillance method, particularly in Europe, where Madec-style scoring is common in field and research settings. (msdvetmanual.com)

In this Hungarian dataset, most lungs were either normal or only mildly affected: 91.0% scored between 0 and 4, while 9.0% had moderate-to-severe lesions, defined as scores from 5 to 28. The anatomical pattern also fit the classic distribution veterinarians associate with EP-like disease, with the most frequent and severe lesions in the cardiac and apical lobes and greater involvement in right-sided lobes. The authors also found no significant link between farm size and lesion occurrence or severity, suggesting that factors other than simple herd scale likely drove the observed differences. (mdpi.com)

That anatomical pattern aligns with standard veterinary references. MSD Veterinary Manual describes enzootic pneumonia lesions as cranioventral consolidations, most commonly affecting the apical and cardiac lobes, while other swine health references note that lung lesion scoring is useful diagnostically but imperfect because similar lesions can have multiple causes and some lesions heal before slaughter. In other words, the Hungarian findings are biologically plausible, but they should still be read as EP-like surveillance data rather than definitive pathogen confirmation. (msdvetmanual.com)

Direct outside commentary on this specific paper appears limited so far, which is not unusual given that it was published on September 26, 2026. Still, the broader literature supports the paper’s practical framing: recent work has emphasized that post-mortem lung scoring remains valuable for herd health management, and newer research is exploring ways to standardize or automate scoring, including artificial intelligence-based image analysis and comparisons between visual-only and visual-palpation systems. That points to an industry trend toward making slaughterhouse respiratory surveillance more scalable and more consistent across sites. (mdpi.com)

Why it matters: For swine veterinarians and production teams, the study is useful less because it identifies a new pathogen and more because it shows what structured, repeated slaughter surveillance can reveal. A five-year decline of this magnitude raises practical questions about whether vaccination programs, pig flow, ventilation, gilt acclimation, antimicrobial strategy, or broader biosecurity improvements changed during the period. Since M. hyopneumoniae infection can depress daily gain and prolong days to market even when mortality is low, trend data like this can help veterinarians test whether respiratory control programs are actually translating into healthier lungs at finish. (msdvetmanual.com)

The study also underscores the limits of relying on a single surveillance stream. MSD Veterinary Manual and swine diagnostic references both note that PCR is now the most commonly used detection tool for M. hyopneumoniae, while lesion scoring provides herd-level pattern recognition rather than definitive etiologic diagnosis. For practicing veterinarians, the takeaway is familiar but important: slaughter checks are most powerful when paired with farm records, clinical observations, and targeted diagnostics from the lower respiratory tract. (msdvetmanual.com)

What to watch: The next step will be whether follow-up work links these lesion trends to specific interventions, pathogen testing, or production outcomes, and whether similar analyses from other European or North American systems confirm that the decline seen in Hungary reflects a broader shift rather than a local management effect. (mdpi.com)