A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine with Southwest Vet Services suggests the lessons learned in dealing with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea can be applied to other diseases that affect swine.
Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea surfaced in Ontario in early 2014 caused by a contaminated plasma source after farms in the U.S. had bean dealing with the disease for the previous nine months.
“The Eastern PED Outbreak: Lessons Learned” was among the topics discussed last week as part of a Swine Innovation Porc session held in conjunction with the 2018 Banff Pork Seminar.
Dr. Christine Pelland, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine with Southwest Vet Services, says PED has opened up a whole avenue of exploring different risk factors.
We thought we knew what biosecurity was till this hit. We took biosecurity seriously with PRRS virus. PED is another virus that it doesn’t take much to infect a pig. It’s carried on manure and so we needed to be cognizant of people, pigs, anything people or pigs touched, and how it was getting into the barn.
It comes down to talking to our highest risk factors, meaning the cull assembly yards that touch the U.S. herd, U.S. plants, continuing to survey and have an awareness on the assembly yards that remain in Ontario that can foster these types o diseases and working with those people to really prevent the dissemination of the virus.
Dr. Christine Pelland-Southwest Vet Services
Dr. Pelland says we can extrapolate what we’re doing for PED to something like Seneca Valley, which, because it resembles Foot and Mouth Disease, will trigger a CFIA investigation which can prompt slaughter plant shutdowns and potentially have trade implications. She says all of the things we’re talking about with PED can be applicable to Seneca Valley or Foot and Mouth or PRRS or a number of other infections.
