The vice president of science and technology with the National Pork Board says lessons learned in dealing with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus will be valuable in designing strategies for dealing with other diseases.
An outbreak of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea that has spread to 18 states since it was first identified in mid-May is showing signs of easing.
Dr. Paul Sundberg, the vice president science and technology with the National Pork Board, says the window that allowed PED to come in may allow other diseases to come in.
One of the things about this infection is that it is an opportunity for identification of additional things that have to go on.
Certainly we have a goal of control and elimination of PED but one of the things that this infection has done, is it has enabled us to do a fairly decent analysis of out vulnerabilities.
As I talked about this window being open for entry, that’s one thing.
We need to close that.
We have discovered that we need to have better protocols for tucking biosecurity and transport, better protocols within packing plants for biosecurity and so there are a number of things, even down to IT capabilities and laboratory capabilities to report infections.
There’s a number of things that we’ve discovered in this that we need to harden, we need to enhance because it has shown us that we do have some issues that have to be resolved.
Dr. Sundberg says the PED epidemic has uncovered the need to be better prepared to respond to PED, to foreign animal diseases and even to endemic diseases that producers have been living with for decades.
He says what we’re learning from PED is going to help in a variety of different ways.
