An outbreak of Transmissible Gastroenteritis in Manitoba is being used to test new tools and procedures developed to respond to and contain more serious infectious disease outbreaks.
Transmissible Gastroenteritis, a viral disease that affects only swine causing vomiting and diarrhea and resulting in particularly high mortality among baby pigs under one week old, has been identified on one farm with two sites in South Central Manitoba.
Manitoba producers are being advised to maintain strict biosecurity protocols to minimize the risk of their farms being infected and to report any signs of the disease to their veterinarian.
Manitoba’s chief veterinary officer Dr. Wayne Lees says the outbreak reminds us that biosecurity is a constant effort that we have to pay attention to every day.
Within Manitoba Agriculture and Rural Initiatives we’re using this outbreak as a way of testing our new tools in terms of the premises registration database and the mapping tools and the surveillance tools that we’ve put in place over the last short while.
These are one of the tools that we will use to be able to know where the farms are.
We’ll use mapping tools to be able to identify all the farms that surround an infected farm so that we could know which farms are at risk and these tools will be used as a precursor should we ever run into a much more serious problem so we’re using this outbreak as a way of testing those tools so that we’ll be ready for any much more serious disease should it appear.
Dr. Lees says producers and their veterinarians are taking aggressive action to eliminate the infection and he expects it to take a few weeks to a month or two to address this particular problem.
He notes we haven’t had any new reports of TGE in the last week or so and he’s confident it’s been contained to this one farm.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
