The Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Centre is encouraging pork producers to talk feed safety with their feed suppliers.
North American swine health officials have turned their attention to African Swine Fever as the viral infection continues to spread in China.
Dr. Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Centre, says there are multiple routes through which ASF could be enter North America but one is through feed ingredients and he encourages producers to start the conversation about feed safety with their feed suppliers.
Up on the SwineHealth.Org web site is a document that describes a decision tree and provides questions that a producer can use to start that, conversation about feed safety with their feed supplier for any of the foreign animal diseases or any of the animal diseases. One of the things that I want to emphasize for ASF, while it’s not here in North America, even in China or where ever it is, it is not a human food safety issue. It only infects pigs, it only affects pigs so it’s not a food safety issue at all but we want to start that conversation between the producers and the feed suppliers about feed safety and those questions are available on the SwineHealth.Org web site.
The American Feed Industry Association, the National Grain and feed Association, the University of Minnesota and Kansas State University all had review of those questions, all helped with that and all had input into their development. That was a great example of the feed industry coming together in collaboration with the pork industry to try to help both out and make sure that we’re doing the best that we can do for the safety of our animals.
~ Dr. Paul Sundberg, Swine Health Information Centre
Dr. Sundberg says the movement of African Swine Fever into China has shone a bright light on the work being done in the U.S. to reduce the risk of transmission of disease through feed.
