The Chair of Sask Pork says the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s continued refusal to change regulations that are increasing the risk bringing PED into Canada is frustrating.
Three Manitoba swine farms have been confirmed infected with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea since the Canadian Food Inspection Agency began enforcing regulations May 1 requiring swine transports returning from U.S. farms to be washed in the U.S. before returning to Canada.
Florian Possberg, the Chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, says producers have been lobbying CFIA to allow equipment to be washed in Canada where we know we have the protocols to do it properly.
We’ve got wash facilities that are world class. Not only do they do an excellent job of sanitizing trucks, trailers, cabs, they also use a bake cycle which uses high temperatures to destroy pathogens that typically escape sanitation by strictly washing and disinfecting.
Besides that, our trailers go down to farms that are typically washed and disinfected. If they’ve had PED there’s a very good chance that they’ve got very low levels left and so these trailers, most of them come back with no contamination.
When we take our trailers to clean farms and then send them to dirty truck washes that contaminate our equipment, we’re really putting our whole industry at risk here and now we’ve got cases that demonstrate that. It just goes against logic and it puts our industry at risk. ~ Florian Possberg – Saskatchewan Pork Development Board
Possberg says producer boards across Canada are of one mind in pressing CFIA for improvements to the regulations to protect the industry so its very frustrating that CFIA has been deaf to these requests.
