The manager of the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network says early identification and timely response will be critical to containing the spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea if the virus makes its way into Canada.
Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea now affects an estimated 30 percent of the American sow herd but so far Canada remains free of the infection.
Dr. Chris Byra, the manager of the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network, told those on hand yesterday for the Banff Pork Seminar, we’ve been lucky but we’ve also done a number of things right to keep it from this country.
Monitoring it through the CSHIN network is one method that we’re tracking it.
If an animal ends up at a laboratory and was positive that would be reported immediately through the chief veterinary officer of the province and then across the country.
Today at this meeting there was proposals to actually move ahead of that, the idea being that there are some farms where the older animals get sick but they don’t get very sick and so sometimes the disease might be mistaken for something else.
If we start monitoring places that pigs accumulate like assembly yards for animals that are being trucked south for instance or slaughter plants we might obtain a positive test that suggests that it could be in Canada and then we would follow up quickly to find out which farm that it had come from.
It would be a way to gain a week or two or three to be able to isolate the organism into one or two or three farms rather than have it explode through a province.
Dr. Byra notes each province has developed a PED response plan.
He says there will not be any official quarantine of the farm but all plans would involve industry helping the farmer move pigs to locations that would not put other farms at risk, we would see a ramping up of disinfection and cleaning of vehicles going to slaughter plants and other pig sites and there would immediately be an epidemiological study to find out which farms have contacted the infected farm and by what means.
