The chair of Sask Pork says an incident earlier this month where a washed truck in Saskatchewan was diagnosed as suspicious for PEDv demonstrates the need to stay on top of biosecurity.
In mid-July Saskatchewan’s Chief Veterinary Officer reported a sample taken from a truck in Saskatchewan that had hauled pigs in Manitoba and Ontario and was washed in Ontario was diagnosed as suspicious for PEDv.
Saskatchewan Pork Development Board chair Florian Possberg says, although follow up tests at the National Lab in Winnipeg were inconclusive, the incident underscores the need to up our game in terms of sanitation.
Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
Saskatchewan is one of the places in North America that has not had an active case of PED in any farm.
We think that that has quite a bit to do with the level of biosecurity we’ve enforced in our industry here.
We know of producers and I know our own operation, we not only use a high level of washes for any trucks coming to our farms but we also have the trucks and trailers washed that go into areas of either the U.S. or eastern Canada that we know have active infections and that’s pretty standard in the industry now.
We’re really taking sanitation to a whole new level to not only protect our own farms but to protect others down stream from us in terms of where our trucks go.
Possberg says the industry learned some lessons from Circovirus a few years ago which have been put to good use in addressing other diseases and, through the Canadian Swine Health Board, went through the process of upping our biosecurity and this has shown to be quite successful.
