The chair of Manitoba Pork Council is encouraging the province’s pork producers to maintain their focus on biosecurity as the Canadian pork industry mounts its response to the first confirmed case of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea in Canada.
Last week a 500 sow farrow to finish operation in Middlesex County, Ontario was confirmed as the first farm in Canada infected by Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
The operation has been locked down and investigators are tracking animals that may have been exposed to the virus that have already left the farm as they focus on containing and eradicating the infection.
Manitoba Pork Council chair Karl Kynoch notes Manitoba Pork Council has been working with the province’s chief veterinary officer to develop an action plan to contain the disease if does find its way into Manitoba.
The longer we go, the more that veterinarians learn about it, the more we try to figure out how it’s spread and that and try to get a chance to figure out how the traceability is on it just to see where it’s come from.
Biosecurity is going to be the big key to this thing.
You need to remember even all the little things and it could be as small as somebody coming onto your yard just to deliver parcels or delivery of feed products, all these type of things.
If a truck is coming onto your yard to load pigs the producer needs to make sure that that truck has been washed and disinfected before it comes onto the yard.
Once it’s backed up to the barn, they’ve started loading the pigs and that that could be to late so the thing is to make sure they know where the truck’s been and if it’s been cleaned properly before.
Changing cloths, where the employees have been is all things that you have to think about.
It’s even some of the other things that would sneak up and catch you so you’re really going to have to think outside of the box on your biosecurity.
Kynoch urges producers to monitor their herds closely for PED like symptoms and immediately report any suspect cases to their herd veterinarian.
He says some producers in the U.S. have said, if they had it to do over, they would have focused more on early containment.
