The manager of animal health and welfare programs with Manitoba Pork says farms in the province that had been infected with PED no longer pose any risk of transmitting the virus.
Since February 2014 a total of 5 Manitoba farms have been infected with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
All have gone through a clean and disinfection process and a umber of those sites are now in the process of confirming their negative status.
Mark Fynn, the manager of animal health and welfare programs with Manitoba Pork, told those on hand this week for Manitoba Pork’s 2015 fall producer meetings there are no longer any positive pigs shedding virus on farm.
Some of the things that have gone into doing the cleaning and disinfection of those sites has really been focusing on animal flow, making sure that we’re not putting new naive animals into those sites that are contaminated with the virus so that we can stop the disease cycle. Then at that point we’re marketing out those animals that are still on the site and then we’re able to do a cleanup of the site when it’s been depopulated to get rid of any traces of the virus on the site and then do testing of that before we put any more naive animals in.
When those new naive animals go in that’s a good time to test to see if they’re picking anything up and whether we’ve actually done a good job in cleaning and disinfecting and I’m happy to say that all the sites have been successful in that endeavor so far. The sites that have been affected by the disease in the past pose very low risk at the moment, partially because they’ve cleaned and disinfected and put naive animals in and haven’t been showing any shedding in those animals but also because any of the manure storages that could potentially be infected have already been pumped out at least once and so that all new manure going in there should be negative manure. So we think that the sites are very low risk to no risk at all.
Fynn says we know the risk of transmission will increase as the weather turns colder so he encourages producers to maintain biosecurity to make sure their farms are not affected.
