Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer is encouraging the province’s pork producers to take advantages of programs being offered through Growing Forward 2 to improve biosecurity on their farms.
Since February, 2014 a total of 5 swine farms in Manitoba, including 2 sow sites and 3 finisher sites, have been infected with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
While one of the affected farms was recently lost to a fire, the remaining 4 farms are expected to be free of the infection within the next couple of months.
Dr. Megan Bergman, Manitoba’s Chief Veterinary Officer, says eradication strategies have been quite successful and she encourages all producers, transporters and service providers to maintain their focus on biosecurity.
I think really continued vigilance on our biosecurity practices is the most important and keeping that virus out of your site from the driveway to the barn door.
Producers have been doing a lot of work in terms of ramping up their biosecurity practices for contact to farms, working with transporters to ensure vehicles are cleaned and disinfected, cleaning and disinfecting their entryways and load out sites, as well as reviewing their protocols for all service providers so that everyone knows what the expectation is before they come onto these sites.
Also, from my perspective, I just want to make sure that I raise the attention to everyone that we continue to have a Growing Forward 2 program that’s funded both by the province and by the federal government that has biosecurity options within it, so I’d like to encourage producers to tap into that if they think it might be helpful to them.
And I’d just like to comment on how great it has been participating both with the industry and the private veterinarians, as well as with the infected farms because I think working together has been a very positive experience and we’ve managed to be quite successful managing this disease because of it.
Dr. Bergman says PEDv is still very infectious, but we have producers, producer groups, and private veterinarians that have been extremely vigilant in both implementing biocontainment with infected farms, but also biosecurity for farms that continue to be negative, and by working together we’ve managed to keep the virus from spreading aggressively throughout our sites.
