Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer expects swine barns in the province that have been infected with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea to be free of the infection within the next couple of months.
Manitoba’s first case of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was identified in February 2014, and since then a total of 5 farms, including 2 sow sites and 3 finisher sites have been infected.
Dr. Megan Bergman, Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer, says so far strategies aimed at ridding the farms of the virus have been quite successful.
The strategies that have been used to eliminate PED from a farm have been developed through consultation with herd veterinarians and information gathered from PED infected regions.
The affected herds and their vets have worked really closely with the CVO to implement the best strategy for their circumstances.
Finisher operations are able to empty their barns, thoroughly clean and disinfect them and then test the barn to ensure that they’ve eliminated the virus prior to repopulation.
Then what we do is implement a testing strategy when we introduce healthy pigs to ensure that they don’t become infected with PED and that helps us to determine that we’ve actually eliminated the virus from the barn.
It’s a bit more challenging when we’re dealing with things like sow barns.
These facilities are not as easy to clean and disinfect and often you don’t end up in a scenario where you actually empty out the barn and so we have to find ways to be able to work with the producer in order to help him become disease free and also manage the farm at the same time.
So one of the strategies that’s been implemented is to ensure we develop immunity as quickly as possible with these pigs that are on site in the farm and that includes strategies such as back feeding and also start to monitor those swine to make sure that we can detect when they stop shedding that virus and the cycle of the virus is complete within the pigs in the barn.
Once that happens then we can start moving forward with the cleaning and disinfection process room by room in those facilities so it does take time and a lot of dedication but our folks are working very hard to do that.
Then we can work on making sure we’re evaluating naive pigs and piglets when they come into the barns so that they continue to maintain a negative status.
Dr. Bergman expects these farms to achieve negative status within the next couple of months.
