Manitoba Agriculture reports the recent spread of PED in southeast Manitoba is shaping up to be multifactorial. Since April 29, 2017, ten swine farms in southeastern Manitoba have broken with PED.
Dr. Glen Duizer, with the Office of Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer, told an Alberta Pork telephone town hall Friday officials have been looking at the various risk factors.
There are certainly linkages to things such as staff movement, to transport, potential contamination on areas such as loadouts. We also have some external service providers that may be a link and we’re following up with some of those. So far I would say that things such as feed and feed movements and deadstock have not been linked to the spread of the disease but we’re continuing to follow up. As far as the bigger areas, maybe not associated with movements particular to a given premise, we’ve looked at things such as drainage and weather patterns, equipment movements, manure application, shared areas such as transport scales. We’re following up on that type of situation as well. There may be some linkages there.
We also have has some risks associated with movement of partial loads where a load is filled at one site then moved to another to complete the load so those are other further risk factors. There may be some factor that weather played into a couple of our infected farms but it in itself is not a factor. Transport routes themselves, because these areas are close to high risk high traffic sites such as provincial packing plants and assembly yards, but even then the transport routs associated with those sites that we did a fair bit of work changing last year, they don’t quite match up to the full pattern here either.
~ Dr. Glen Duizer, Manitoba Agriculture
Dr. Duizer says definitely we’re looking at a multifaceted component of spread that appears to be happening primarily within geographic areas.
