The Canadian Swine Health Board says a just completed national biosecurity benchmarking survey will assist in developing enhanced biosecurity programming.
The Canadian Swine Health Board has completed a national biosecurity benchmarking survey and is now in the process of analyzing the data collected.
Dr. Daniel Hurnik, a professor of veterinary medicine with the University of Prince Edward Island’s Veterinary College, told those on hand yesterday for Canadian Swine Health Forum 2010 the survey covered 147 questions which looked at everything from farm location to visitation policy to use of feed and bedding.
We set the survey up to be national in scope.
We divided the country into five regions, B.C., prairies, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes because this represents the different production regions within the country.
To select the farms and the people that would do the survey we used the base that exists through the Canadian Quality Assurance Program where there are trained validators and it’s a program that captures the majority of production in Canada.
We used the validators and the subset of farms that volunteered to participate in this and we used the CQA validators to visit the farms and record the data.
We used a company that has their skills are the measurement and certification of farms, a multinational company based in the UK and they provided us with the questions and the analytic tools.
The surveys were carried out on commercial farms in the spring, breeders and AI units this summer and we’re now in the process of looking at and analyzing the information.
Dr. Hurnik expects a final report In December.
He says information gathered through the survey will be used in designing programs to enhance biosecurity.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
