The Canadian Swine Health Board has issued a Swine Health Awareness Bulletin aimed at familiarizing pork producers with the symptoms of foot and mouth disease.
The Canadian Swine Health Board has launched a series of Swine Health Awareness Bulletins designed to keep the pork industry informed of emerging or potential health threats, how to minimize their risk and how to respond to suspicious observations.
Board chair Florian Possberg says the first bulletin deals with swine vesicular disease, a condition where animals display a number of symptoms including blisters on their noses and hooves.
The issue around swine vesicular disease is the most severe form of it is food and mouth disease which can really devastate a whole livestock industry for a country.
There are other conditions that mimic what you would expect from foot and mouth disease so our bulletin is really to provide information to alert producers as to what to look for in terms of what this condition is.
It’s something that producers don’t see very often.
It’s a rare condition.
Even the false positives, if we can call it that, similar type conditions that look like foot and mouth disease, that happens rarely.
So to have information that producers have at hand, if they see something suspicious, they can reference from our bulletins to determine whether this is something that they should be concerned about or not.
Possberg stresses keeping the industry informed of emerging or potential health threats and how to respond to suspicious observations is critical to the health and viability of the pork industry.
The one-page bulletins describe the health threat, its symptoms, required actions, preventative recommendations and photographs illustrating what to look for and are being distributed to industry stakeholders and being made available through the Canadian Swine Health Board web site.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
