Manitoba Pork Council is encouraging its members to step up their focus on biosecurity after a suspect case of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was identified on a wean to finish farm in the province.
Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was first identified in the United States in May and it broke last month in Ontario.
Yesterday the Chief Veterinary Office of Manitoba reported the first positive samples of the virus in Manitoba from pigs on a weaned to finish farm, samples have been sent to the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg for confirmation and that’s expected later today.
Manitoba Pork Council chair Karl Kynoch says, to prepare Manitoba’s pork industry has been working closely with the provincial veterinary office to develop an action plan and so far that action plan is working.
Basically what we want to do is work on trying to contain the disease and prevent the spread of it so we’ll be focussing on trying to trace where the disease has come from and also be looking into if there’s been any pigs moved off the farm, where they’ve went and they’ll be checking to see if that disease has been carried there.
The biggest thing of the plan is to notify the people in the immediate area and try to figure out the track of the disease and what needs to be done to contain it to that farm and try to eliminate it.
Biosecurity is the farmers’ main defence against this disease.
Some of the farms with high biosecurity have managed to keep the disease off of their farms and it has proven a very useful tool so the one thing that we are doing again today is we are encouraging all farmers to keep their biosecurity protocols as high as possible.
It’s up to the farmers to make sure that they know where those trucks have come from, that they know those trucks have been disinfected properly and they need to make sure that they take charge of their own biosecurity protocols and they need to strongly enforce them.
Kynoch notes Manitoba pork Council has been working with producers in the United States and Ontario who have been affected by the virus to learn what they’ve done right, what they’ve done wrong, what they might have done different and what has been working.
He stresses you can keep this disease out of your barn by keeping biosecurity very high.
