Manitoba’s pork industry is counting on a newly introduced information sharing imitative to help producers respond to and grain control of a recent surge in the number of cases of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
The Manitoba Coordinated Disease Response initiative is an industry led approach to sharing information among producers at risk of being exposed to PED modeled after a program being used in Ontario originally set up to deal with PRRS which has also been used to respond to PED.
Manitoba Pork General Manager Andrew Dickson explains the initiative will provide a more formal way of sharing information on factors like the distribution of the infection, what biosecurity protocols are being used, what updates need to be done and what’s being done in terms of disease management.
A number of producers are sitting down with their veterinarians and going back over what they’ve got for a biosecurity plan and making improvements in their operation where necessary.
If you are a neighbour of a producer who’s got the disease, you’re going to be very interested in knowing what they’re doing to bring it under control in terms of how it might impact your operation and what steps you need to take to deal with the potential of infection spreading from their site to yours.
The other thing that’s going on is there’s a lot of operations that are linked because of commercial relationships between sow barns, nursery barns and finisher barns and the flow of pigs through those different barns affects a number of people. So a nursery barn might be supplying a number of finishing barns that are not necessarily owned by the people that own the sows in the first place.
The business arrangements do change and it’s important that everyone down the chain understand what’s happening.
~ Andrew Dickson, Manitoba Pork
Dickson says the concept has been very successful in Ontario where the number of infected barns was reduced from 150 to 15.
For more information email swinehealth@manitobapork.com or phone 204 235-2305.
