The Veterinary Counsel with the Canadian Pork Council says biosecurity remains the key to gaining control of a surge of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea cases in Manitoba.
Since the end of April over 50 new cases of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea have been confirmed on Manitoba swine farms.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff, the Veterinary Counsel with the Canadian Pork Council, says, biosecurity remains king, making sure you’ve had a recent biosecurity audit, spending time with your on-farm team going through training scenarios and working on the basics.
This virus doesn’t move in mysterious and magical ways. It moves in predictable and preventable ways and so we’ve really got to continue to work hard on focusing on those basics of good sound biosecurity.
At a time like this when there’s so much virus circulating in the environment we almost need to move people from the ideas of enhanced biosecurity to almost a wartime biosecurity approach. We’ve really got to drill down and make sure we have all of the very best practices we can put in place happening every day.
There’s a lot of virus circulating throughout southern Manitoba right now but there is a lot, hundreds of farms still within the regions affected remain negative and they are at very high risk of becoming affected by the virus.
Without question, if we look toward Saskatchewan and Alberta and British Columbia the risk grows every day that virus will be moved from southern Manitoba into the pork industries in the three provinces to the west so efforts aren’t just going on in southern Manitoba to contain virus but significant effort has been put in to exclude the virus from the other provinces as well.
~ Dr. Egan Brockhoff, Canadian Pork Council
Dr. Egan Brockhoff acknowledges, while the situation has been frustrating, we do have the capacity to contain and eliminate the virus from the region.
