The Saskatchewan Pork Development Board is advising swine producers to approach biosecurity from two levels in order to guard against any risk of allowing the virus causes foot and mouth disease to enter their farms.
An aggressive strain of foot and mouth disease has surfaced in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong raising concerns the infection could spread to other regions.
Sask Pork producers services manager Harvey Wagner encourages producers in Canada to approach biosecurity from two levels.
The first level is our basic high level biosecurity so that’s things like introduction of animals only from farms who you know their health status is, semen from certified insemination centres, a good double entry biosecurity system so that you’re not just walking into a barn, that you’re actually taking a shower in shower out arrangement or at least that the very minimum changing cloths and washing hands.
Definitely follow the rules that you don’t feed food waste to animals, it’s against the law in Canada, we don’t want to see that for sure and try and prevent access to the buildings by wild birds and strays.
Then on the very specific things for this particular disease outbreak is to avoid visitors if all possible to the farm but particularly visitors from Asia or if they’ve been to Asia.
We really don’t want to have them coming here because the risk is fairly great.
They shouldn’t be there for at least 14 days after they’ve left Asia.
Those are the real key things.
Just try and make sure that your contact is minimal and keep a fairly high level of biosecurity, really be vigilant
Wagner says it’s not something to be overly fearful of but we do need to be vigilant and really pay attention to where people have been and ask questions before they come onto a hog farm or in particular have contact with the pigs.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
