The chair of the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board is confident the main source of PED virus in eastern Canada has been stopped.
Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea has been confirmed on 20 farms in eastern Canada.
Earlier this week the Canadian Food Inspection Agency indicated bioassay testing has determined a U.S. origin porcine plasma product contains enough virus to cause disease in pigs.
Dr. Doug Mac Dougald, the chair of the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board, says there’s a direct link to that product and those cases so we have a pretty clear picture of how the majority of this occurred.
There was a feed recall a week and a half ago thus we believe that the primary source of the virus for the majority of these cases has been stopped.
The good news thus far is that there’s only a small number of cases that look like biosecurity or biosecurity gaps is the cause.
We expect some more to follow obviously with the number of cases we have but our conclusion is that our surveillance and biosecurity measures thus far with PED appears to be holding up very well, maybe even surprisingly well, given the cold weather and the ability of this virus to live and move around easily in the winter time.
Dr. Mac Dougald says the goal at this point in Ontario is eliminating the virus from the known sites and we know we will be successful at eliminating this virus from the know sites.
From there he says the primary focus is on containment so we can get into the spring and early summer, when the virus will not be nearly as easily transmitted, with as few positive cases and positive sites as possible and continue with surveillance to aid in effective early detection.
