A Veterinary Epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry says U.S. traffic coming into Manitoba continues to pose the greatest risk for exposing the western Canadian swine herd to PED.
Representatives of the 4 western provinces hold monthly conference calls to discuss Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea control and prevention strategies.
Dr. Julia Keenliside, a Veterinary Epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, told Alberta Pork’s monthly PED telephone town hall last week, while environmental testing has been discontinued in B.C., monitoring continues in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
In Alberta, I’ll lead right off with, we have no positives to report on our surveillance program, which is good news for having no positive PEDs or Delta Coronavirus. Saskatchewan is continuing with their program and they’ve had 4 environmental positives over the last while for Delta Coronavirus only at their high traffic sites.
One sample was actually a fecal sample from a sparrow that was strongly positive so they suspect that these are the avian Delta Coronavirus that we looked at last year. They will be sending those off for confirmation that it is indeed the avian and not the porcine.
Manitoba continues to work to get all of their farms negative in the very near future. I think this is a great success story for Manitoba to be able to accomplish this in such a short period of time. They’ve got 1 declared negative already and they’ve got 2 more presumptive negatives.
They do get occasional PED positive samples on environmental testing from their sites that have regular U.S. contact and I think that is a reminder for everyone in western Canada that that’s probably our weak link, is our portal with the U.S. through that traffic through Manitoba.
Dr. Julia Keenliside says we have to remain cognizant of the possibility of the virus entering Canada through Manitoba.
