The director of swine health information and research with the National Pork Board, says stepped up biosecurity is the first line of defense against the spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
Since mid-May, when Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus was first identified in the United States, swine health researchers have been working to determine how the infection made its way into the U.S. and from where and what to do about it.
Dr. Lisa Becton, the director of swine health information and research with the National Pork Board, says the main focus has been identifying strategies to prevent the spread of the infection.
Right now at least within the United States we do know we have 14 different states that have positive cases identified in over 346 cases of PEDV here in the U.S.
In discussions with my counterparts within the Canadian Swine Health Board right now they are reporting no cases within Canada and are looking at trying to prevent any cases from occurring.
Really our focus has been on looking at biosecurity and really stressing the need for folks to reassess the different biosecurity procedures that they have on farm especially as it relates to transportation.
We don’t necessarily want to single out one group but we have to move pigs, trailers are the way that we move pigs and those can harbor different diseases.
We’re working with people and doing some studies that have shown there are some higher risk areas, whether it’s a cull depot, a fair or even sometimes at the packing plant and just having folks be aware that they will need to look at how they’re washing and disinfecting trailers and may need to step up the frequency of when they’re doing that just again to reduce their own internal risk of potentially getting this disease.
Dr. Becton says a lot of information has gone out for people on what they can do to tighten up their biosecurity and a lot of people are doing that but there still is ongoing infection of different sites.
