Manitoba Agriculture is hopeful the use of dedicated swine transportation equipment to move cull sows will help reduce the potential for spreading PED.
Since the end of April 59 Manitoba swine operations have been confirmed infected by Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
Dr. Glen Duizer, with the Office of Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer, told an Alberta Pork PEDv Telephone Town Hall yesterday, when ever we deal with an infected site, especially a primary site, there’s lots of possible sources of infection but it appears the initial site was infected by a cull sow transport vehicle.
There is a linkage to a cull sow transport vehicle. What normally would have worked for a cull sow vehicle to be used in its normal downtime, it’s more cleaning, washing disinfection, baking, third party inspection should have mitigated any chance of that being spread over.
All of that was in place but unfortunately the odds probably were not in favor that particular day. We can not say for certain that was the source. I have to stress that but it’s certainly one of the most likely reasons that site became infected. That’s why we’ve seen now the shift to dedicated line hauling cull sows from assembly yards in Manitoba and simply have segregated that line entirely.
We’ve realized that, even though again, I want to stress that we can’t say that that was the smoking gun, it is a highly probably risk factor in this infection, in this outbreak and there’s been mitigation to deal with that on an ongoing basis.
~ Dr. Glen Duizer, Manitoba Agriculture
Dr. Duizer says, when we have to move cull sows out of infected premises, they are being directly transported to packing plants in the U.S. avoiding contaminating any high traffic high risk facilities in Manitoba.
