The pig diseases that matter most in Uganda are African swine fever, gut disease, the respiratory group and the pork tapeworm, and the first of those has no vaccine available here and no treatment at all. What a keeper does in the hours after a pig falls ill decides more than any diagnosis does. One Ugandan survey found four farmers in ten sold the sick animal.
African Swine Fever Is the Disease That Decides Everything Else
African swine fever is a viral disease of pigs whose mortality rate can reach 100 per cent in an infected herd. It does not infect people. No vaccine is available to a Ugandan keeper and there is no treatment, which puts it in a different category from every other disease on this page: everything else is a cost, and this one is the end of the enterprise.
The scale in Uganda is documented. A national compilation of district veterinary officer monthly reports over a fourteen year period, from 2010 to 2023, held together with ministry and Food and Agriculture Organization records, logged 1,521 African swine fever cases and found the disease present in 66 per cent of Uganda's districts. Cases occurred year round, with no clean season. Clustering was strongest in central districts and in border districts, particularly those bordering Tanzania and those along lake shores, while occurrence in the Acholi, Karamoja, Lango, Ankole, West Nile and Kigezi sub regions was more sporadic. Districts holding 30,000 pigs or more reported more cases, which is what you would expect of a disease that travels with pig movement.
Genetic work over the same period found that the virus circulating in domestic pigs in all regions of Uganda is a single genotype, and that isolates differ from historic regional ones while resembling each other. The practical meaning is that this is an established resident infection rather than a series of fresh incursions.
How often it reaches a given farm depends on where you ask. A longitudinal study of 200 randomly selected pig keeping households in northern Uganda measured a yearly household level incidence of 19 per cent. A survey of 99 farmers in five districts chosen because they had been badly affected found 41 of 96 respondents, about 43 per cent, reporting pigs with the disease in the previous twelve months. The two are not in conflict. One is a random sample and the other is a sample of hot spots, and between them they tell you that in an affected district roughly two farms in five expect it in a year.
The virus survives in the environment in a way that makes carelessness expensive. It persists on clothes, boots and vehicle wheels, and it survives in pork products including cured and smoked meat. So the routes onto a farm are a visitor, a trader, a borrowed wheelbarrow, swill containing pork scraps, and a newly bought pig. That is a biosecurity problem rather than a veterinary one, and it is covered properly in the farm biosecurity guide.
Why You Cannot Diagnose African Swine Fever by Looking at the Pig
This is the finding that should change how a Ugandan keeper thinks, and it comes from a year of sampling at abattoirs in the Kampala metropolitan area.
Among all pigs that tested positive for the virus by any sample type, only 3.3 per cent showed severe fever. Of pigs positive on a blood sample, 26 per cent had widespread haemorrhages of the spleen; among pigs positive on lymph node, tonsil or spleen samples the figure was nearer 15 per cent. The median score for gross post mortem lesions across all positive pigs was six out of a possible thirty three. The study's conclusion was blunt: infected pigs presented as healthy animals or with subacute or acute disease, the picture varied, and surveillance needs confirmatory laboratory diagnosis because other pathogens produce similar signs and lesions.
Two things follow. A pig that looks well can be carrying and shedding the virus, which is exactly how it leaves a farm in the back of a trader's vehicle. And a pig that looks terrible may have something else, so treating on appearance wastes money and time on the wrong problem.
What Ugandan Farmers Actually Do When a Pig Falls Sick
A survey of 170 smallholder pig farmers in Masindi district recorded what happens next, and it is the most useful behavioural evidence on this page.
Almost four fifths of the farmers, 79.4 per cent, reported gut disease on their farms, affecting animals of all ages throughout the year and falling mainly on local breeds. When a pig fell ill, 62.9 per cent treated it themselves, 40.6 per cent sold it, and only 25.9 per cent consulted a veterinarian. Those add to more than a hundred because farmers reported more than one response.
Read the middle figure again. Selling a sick pig converts a disease problem into cash and exports the disease to whoever buys it, and in a country where African swine fever sits in two thirds of districts and travels with pig movement, it is the single most effective way to keep the virus circulating. It is also entirely rational for the individual farmer, which is why telling people not to do it has never worked. What changes the behaviour is having somewhere else for the loss to go, and nothing on a smallholding currently provides that.
Gut Disease Is the Commonest Complaint on a Ugandan Pig Farm
The Masindi survey did more than count complaints. It identified what was associated with them, and all three of the main factors are things a keeper controls.
Mixing different herds of pigs carried about four times the odds of gut disease. Feeding pigs on raw tubers carried about two and a half times the odds. Letting pigs scavenge was also associated with it. Being a female farmer came out as a predictor too, which the authors read as a reason to involve women directly in pig health work rather than as anything about the animals. Their conclusion was that poor husbandry, meaning raw tuber feeding, scavenging and herd mixing, explained the widespread gut disease, and that confining and housing pigs is the minimum standard worth adopting.
Raw tuber feeding is worth a moment because it is so common. Cassava and sweet potato fed raw carry both a digestibility problem and a contamination route, and where institutional or household leftovers are fed, the ministry's own pig guidance is that leftover food must be boiled for at least half an hour before it goes to pigs. That instruction is a food safety rule and a disease rule at once.
Worms sit inside this picture and they have their own page. One useful finding belongs here rather than there: in a study across two Ugandan districts, 57.4 per cent of pigs that tested positive for the pork tapeworm were also carrying at least one gut worm. The two problems arrive by the same route, which is why deworming and pen hygiene are one subject rather than two.
Respiratory Disease Is the Cost You Never See
Lung disease in pigs rarely kills and is rarely diagnosed on a Ugandan smallholding, and the post mortem evidence says it is nearly universal.
Of 167 pig lungs examined at slaughter in Lira district, 74.2 per cent showed pleuropneumonia, 29.9 per cent showed catarrhal purulent bronchopneumonia and pleuritis was recorded in a sixth of them. Blood testing from the same pigs put the true prevalence of four important respiratory pathogens at: Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae 25.1 per cent, Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae 11.5 per cent, porcine circovirus type 2 9.7 per cent and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus 7.5 per cent. Lungworm was found in 29.3 per cent of the lungs.
The interaction is the point. Pigs carrying more than one of those pathogens had about two and a half times the odds of showing more than one form of pneumonia, and pigs carrying lungworm had a similar increase. So these agents do not queue up politely; they compound, and the lungworm burden that a keeper thinks of as a worm problem is part of the respiratory problem.
Two cautions on those numbers. The pleuritis figure in that study is published with a confidence interval that does not contain its own point estimate, which is an arithmetic slip in the source, so this page gives the pleuritis prevalence loosely as about a sixth rather than to one decimal place. And regional variation is real: the same reproductive and respiratory virus that tested at 7.5 per cent in northern Uganda was found in under 1 per cent of pigs at central Ugandan abattoirs, while the same central study found 89.3 per cent of pigs seropositive for swine influenza A. Exposure to influenza on that scale is not the same as disease, and nobody has established what it costs Ugandan pigs, but it does mean a coughing herd in central Uganda has more candidate causes than a foreign guide would suggest.
Piglet Scour: the Disease Where a Test Result Misleads
Diarrhoea in suckling piglets and newly weaned pigs is what Ugandan smallholders name as their biggest piglet problem, and the research on it carries a warning about testing that applies well beyond pigs.
Work on Escherichia coli isolated from piglets and weaners in northern and eastern Uganda found the strains carried particular toxin and adhesin genes, with one fimbrial type predominant in scouring suckling piglets. The finding that matters is negative: there was no statistically reliable difference in the prevalence of individual virulence factors between the pigs that had diarrhoea and the pigs that did not. The organism is present in healthy animals too. So a laboratory result naming it does not by itself prove it caused the scour in front of you, and the authors' recommendation was preventive, pointing at vaccination against the predominant type as one control measure rather than at treating each case.
A second cause of piglet wasting is almost completely unrecognised here. Porcine circovirus type 2 systemic disease was investigated in central Uganda and confirmed in a quarter of twenty piglets that were sampled because they showed chronic wasting and persistent diarrhoea. In the same study, every one of 131 survey respondents and all 31 farmers in focus groups had never heard of the disease, and only two of twelve animal health workers interviewed knew about it. A wasting piglet with lasting diarrhoea is not automatically a worm case, and the evidence is that most people advising on it in Uganda are not looking for this.
Swine Dysentery Is Bacterial, and a Ugandan Manual Says Otherwise
Swine dysentery produces bloody, mucoid diarrhoea in growing and finishing pigs and it is caused by a bacterium, from the genus Brachyspira. This matters practically because bacterial and viral disease call for completely different responses, and because a Ugandan piggery manual in circulation describes swine dysentery as viral in its prose while its own table in the same document classifies it as bacterial.
The table is right. A keeper who reads the prose and concludes that nothing can be done has been misled by a document that is otherwise sound, and this page names the error rather than the publication, because the correction is the useful part. It also illustrates a habit worth keeping: when a manual contradicts itself, its table usually beats its paragraph, and either way the right move is to ask a vet rather than to pick the reading you prefer.
The Growth Your Herd Loses to Disease You Never Diagnose
Ugandan work has quantified what subclinical disease costs, and the figures are more useful than a mortality rate because they apply to the pigs that live.
In a year long study following 288 weaner and grower pigs aged two to six months across 94 farms in Lira district, a pig exposed to the reproductive and respiratory virus gained 17.1 grammes a day less than a comparable unexposed pig, and a pig carrying Ascaris roundworm gained 16.8 grammes a day less.
The conversion from grammes a day to kilogrammes is arithmetic on the study's own published daily figures rather than a figure the study prints, and it is shown here so you can check it. The study also reported treatment expenses in United States dollars, which this page does not reproduce because a dollar figure from a past survey period is no use for planning in shillings. The authors' own conclusion was that improving management practices to reduce infection reduces the losses, which is the same conclusion the hygiene evidence on the deworming page reaches from a different direction.
The Pork Tapeworm and the Other Diseases People Catch From Pigs
Several pig diseases in Uganda are a human health matter, and the honest summary is that one of them is serious, two are real but limited, and two that foreign guides warn about were looked for here and barely found.
The pork tapeworm is the serious one. Pigs are the intermediate host and people carry the adult worm; when the larval stage lodges in a person's central nervous system it is a leading cause of acquired epilepsy in endemic areas. Measured prevalence in Ugandan pigs varies enormously with district and with the test used, from about 5 per cent on an antigen test in two central and western districts to about a third on an antigen test in one northern district. A 2023 study of 1,049 pigs from 714 households across four northern districts, adjusted for test sensitivity and specificity, put prevalence at 17.4 per cent and confirmed that region as hyperendemic. Older pigs were at higher risk, as were pigs that roamed freely, while having a toilet in the compound was protective. Different tests measure different things, which is why those figures span so widely: an antibody test shows past exposure, an antigen test indicates living cysts, and a hand examination under the tongue finds only what is near the surface.
There is good news attached, and it is rare on this page. A controlled trial in two eastern Ugandan districts vaccinated pigs against the tapeworm alongside a prescription dewormer at roughly three monthly intervals for eighteen months. Baseline prevalence was 16.2 per cent across both sites. At the end, no pig in the intervention area carried a viable cyst, against 5.4 per cent in the control area. So unlike African swine fever, this one has a tool that worked in Uganda. It is a veterinary intervention rather than something a farmer buys off a shelf, and a vet or district veterinary officer is the route to it.
Leptospirosis is real and widespread. A survey of 926 slaughter pigs across three Ugandan regions found 26.7 per cent carrying antibodies, with pigs from the eastern and northern regions roughly three times more likely to be positive than pigs from the central region. A separate study of 649 pigs at a Kampala slaughterhouse found the bacterium's DNA in the kidney or reproductive tissue of 10 per cent of them, with at least four distinct types circulating. Those two figures measure different things and both are correct: antibodies show a pig met the organism, DNA in the kidney shows a pig is carrying and possibly shedding it. People at greatest occupational risk are farmers, traders and slaughterhouse workers, through contact with aborted foetuses, urine and other fluids. Gloves and handwashing are not fussiness on a pig unit.
Bovine tuberculosis turns up occasionally. Of 150 mesenteric lymph nodes with suspicious lesions collected from roughly a thousand slaughtered pigs in Mubende district, three carried Mycobacterium bovis, and all three isolates were identical, suggesting a shared source. Rare, but it is a human pathogen and it is a reason lesions found at slaughter should be reported rather than trimmed away.
Jiggers in Pigs: the Dry Season Disease Nobody Lists
Tungiasis, caused by the burrowing female sand flea, affects pigs in Uganda and appears on no general pig disease guide. It belongs on this one because pigs are among the main domestic reservoirs, and because the human version is a painful neglected disease of poor households.
A study following 35 affected pigs in 22 households across a dry season measured how fast it builds. Over four weeks, the share of animals with lesions rose from 57 per cent to 71 per cent, and the median number of lesions per pig rose from one to eleven. A severity score for acute pig tungiasis rose from zero to six over the same period, and how bad a pig got depended heavily on how many fleas it already had at the start. The off host stages shed into the environment increase the risk to everything else sharing the ground, people included.
The two practical readings are that the dry season is when this accelerates, so that is when to inspect feet and bellies rather than at the end of the rains, and that an animal already carrying lesions is the one that will get much worse, so it is where attention belongs first. Treatment is a veterinary matter and no product, dose or interval appears here.
Diseases the Foreign Guides List That Ugandan Testing Did Not Find
A pig keeper reading an overseas disease guide gets a list built for a different continent. Ugandan researchers have looked for several of the headline items and the results are worth knowing, because a disease you are worrying about wrongly is a disease you are spending money on wrongly.
| Disease | What Ugandan testing found | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Classical swine fever | All samples negative | Kampala abattoirs |
| Swine brucellosis | Under 1 per cent at most | Three districts plus abattoir |
| Q fever | Not detected in any pig | Kampala slaughterhouse |
| Trichinella | No muscle larvae isolated | Central and eastern |
| African swine fever | Present in 66 per cent of districts | Nationwide reports |
The brucellosis result deserves spelling out because it is also a lesson about tests. Of 1,665 pig serum samples from three major pig keeping districts and the main Kampala abattoir, only three came back positive on a first screening test, all three were negative on a confirmatory test, and two turned out to carry antibodies against a different bacterium entirely, Yersinia enterocolitica. Further molecular testing was negative. The authors concluded that in this production system the risk of acquiring brucellosis from pigs or pork is negligible, while noting that pigs may carry the Yersinia organism instead.
The Trichinella work followed a similar path. Of 1,125 pigs, 6.9 per cent were positive on one antibody test, but only 31 per cent of those were confirmed on a second method, giving an overall confirmed seroprevalence of 2.1 per cent. Attempts to isolate muscle larvae from 499 diaphragm samples all failed, and the authors concluded that even if pigs are infected the larval burden in pork is too low to pose a major risk to consumers. The most likely explanation for the unconfirmed positives was cross reaction with other gut worms.
Both cases carry the same instruction. A single positive test is a question, not an answer, and the number a Ugandan keeper should ask about is the confirmed one.
What This Disease Guide Will Not Tell You
Everything below is deliberately absent, and the reason is that a wrong number here kills animals or puts residues into pork.
No dose, no rate, no dilution, no injection route, no treatment interval, and no product or brand name, for any disease on this page. No withdrawal period figure either, although one applies to almost every veterinary product a pig receives. What this page will say about withdrawal is that the period exists, that it is stated on the product's own label, that it applies before the pig can be slaughtered for meat, and that the documented Ugandan habit of treating pigs shortly before sale collides with it directly. Ask the vet or the supplier what the period is for the specific product, and honour it.
No vaccination schedule appears either. Vaccine availability for pigs in Uganda changes, some of what is used elsewhere is not registered here, and the one disease most keepers most want a vaccine for does not have an available one. A vet or the district veterinary office can say what is currently obtainable in your district, which a web page cannot.
When to Call a Vet to Your Pig Farm, and What to Have Ready
Only about a quarter of Ugandan smallholders call a vet when a pig falls sick, and the four situations below are the ones where that quarter gets its money back.
Call when more than one pig is affected within a few days, because a cluster is a different problem from a sick individual and African swine fever presents as a cluster. Call when a pig dies without a period of visible illness. Call when a pig is not eating, since an off feed pig is the earliest reliable sign of almost everything on this page. And call when a piglet scours for more than a day or two, or wastes steadily, because the two causes with real Ugandan evidence behind them cannot be told apart without a laboratory.
Have ready before the vet arrives: how many pigs are affected and their ages, how many days it has been going on, exactly what the pigs have been fed including any swill or raw tubers, whether any animal has been bought in or mixed with another herd recently, what if anything you have already given and when, and whether any pig has died. That last list is most of a diagnosis, and it is free. Keep it in a livestock record book as you go rather than reconstructing it under pressure.
Most of what prevents the diseases on this page is housing, feeding and movement control rather than medicine. Floors and drainage are handled in the pig housing guide, the litter in the piglet management guide, worms and pen hygiene on the deworming page, and the enterprise as a whole in the pig farming guide and across the livestock section. If you are still deciding whether to keep pigs at all, disease risk is a budget line rather than a footnote, and the startup cost page treats it as one. When something looks wrong, getting it seen early is the cheapest version of every option on this page.
Frequently Asked Questions About Common Pig Diseases in Uganda
Is there a vaccine for African swine fever in Uganda? No vaccine is available to a Ugandan pig keeper and there is no treatment for the disease. Ugandan research published on the virus circulating here still refers to a commercial vaccine as something that may become available rather than something in use. Control rests entirely on keeping the virus off the farm and on not moving pigs out of an affected one. Ask your district veterinary office what the current position is, because it is the one thing on this page most likely to change.
What does it cost when disease hits a pig herd? More than the dead pigs, and the page gives you the method rather than a total. A pig exposed to the reproductive and respiratory virus lost about 3.4 kilogrammes of liveweight over a 200 day fattening period and a roundworm carrier lost about the same, so multiply those kilogrammes by your own farm gate price per kilogramme. For African swine fever the loss is the herd plus the quarantine period, and Ugandan value chain work records farmers as the group worst hit by quarantine through unsold pigs, extra feed for animals they cannot sell and the cost of the measures themselves. The startup cost page builds it into a budget and current livestock prices move constantly.
Can I catch anything from my pigs? Yes, and the list is shorter than foreign guides suggest but it is not empty. The pork tapeworm is the one that matters, because its larval stage in a person can cause epilepsy, and northern Uganda is confirmed as a high prevalence area. Leptospirosis is widespread in Ugandan pigs and the people most exposed are farmers, traders and slaughterhouse workers through contact with urine, aborted foetuses and other fluids. Bovine tuberculosis turns up rarely. Brucellosis and Q fever were looked for in Ugandan pigs and all but absent, and African swine fever does not infect people at all.
Why do my piglets keep scouring? There are several candidates and they cannot be separated by eye. The bacterium most often blamed is present in healthy piglets too, so finding it does not prove it caused this outbreak. A wasting piglet with persistent diarrhoea may have a circovirus problem that almost nobody in Uganda looks for. Feeding raw tubers, letting pigs scavenge and mixing herds were all associated with gut disease in Ugandan survey data, so start by changing those three things and get a diagnosis rather than working through treatments.
My pigs are coughing. How serious is it? Serious as a cost rather than as an emergency, usually. Three quarters of pig lungs examined at slaughter in one Ugandan district showed pleuropneumonia, and several bacterial and viral agents plus lungworm were circulating, with animals carrying more than one showing worse lung damage. Coughing rarely empties a pen and it quietly slows growth for months. A vet can say which agents are likely in your district and what is worth doing.
Should I buy pigs from a neighbour whose herd looks healthy? Healthy looking is not much reassurance for this disease. Only about one in thirty pigs positive for African swine fever showed severe fever, and the abattoir study found infected animals presenting as healthy. Buy as few animals as possible from as few sources as possible, keep them well away from your own herd for a period your vet advises, and never bring in a pig from a farm that has had recent deaths.
Do pigs in Uganda carry sleeping sickness? Pigs in tsetse areas do carry trypanosome parasites, and in a study covering two northern districts 6.3 per cent of 400 pigs were positive for the broad Trypanosoma brucei group. When the same samples were tested for the specific subspecies that causes Gambian sleeping sickness in people, no pig was positive, and the authors found no evidence that livestock were acting as reservoir hosts in that area. They also noted the limits of the test used. So the answer is that pigs there carry related parasites without evidence of carrying that particular human one.
What is the single most useful thing I can do about pig disease? Confine the pigs and stop mixing herds. Confinement removes the scavenging route, the mixing route and most of the tapeworm route at once, and it is what the Ugandan survey authors named as the minimum good husbandry standard. Everything else on this page is cheaper once that is done.
Veterinary services, vaccine availability and drug prices vary by district and change, so check what is currently obtainable near you and ask the district veterinary office rather than relying on a guide. A relationship with one vet before you need one is worth more than any product on a shelf.