The Office of Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer reports the province’s pork sector is well on its way toward getting PED out of Manitoba.
Since April 80 sites in southeastern Manitoba, including 25 sow herds, 16 nurseries and 39 finisher operations have been infected by Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
Dr. Glen Duizer, with the Office of Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer, told those on hand last week for an Alberta Pork Telephone Town Hall the good news is there have been no cases since October 24th.
We are well down the road of getting the disease out of our area. At this point we have 24 presumptive negative farms and we would have 24 transitional farms. So, of the 80, 48 of them have been confirmed to have reached a stage where the disease is being cleaned up and, of those 48, 24 of them have reached a point where all animals, all staff areas, all contact areas, pretty much everything outside of the manure handling and the manure storage is considered negative for PED.
We are happy to progress that far. We have a pretty good expectation over the next four to five weeks we’ll have a significant number that will move on through transition to presumptive negative so we expect that to continue to move in the right direction.
~ Dr. Glen Duizer, Manitoba Agriculture
Dr. Duizer says, with everything working out the way it is right now, if it stays on that path, we should have all of our farms from the outbreak reach a presumptive negative status by the end of March. He acknowledges, there is concern over what will happen next year in that April, May, June period when we’ve typically seen outbreaks happen.
