By Bruce Cochrane
An Alberta based swine veterinarian is advising western Canadian pork producers to be on the alert for a number of potential disease threats heading into the cool fall season.
The Canadian Western Swine Health Intelligence Network continues to track swine disease in western Canada and provide swine health surveillance data.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff, with Prairie Swine Health Services in Red Deer, says, if we look at information coming out of the Canadian Western Swine Health Intelligence Network, it's been a busy summer.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff-Prairie Swine Health Services:
There's no question that we've had increased challenges with Influenza A viruses and that seems to be consistent across the country and so we really want producers to be aware that influenza is an increased challenge and influenza is causing more challenge today than it did 10 years ago.
It seems to be more aggressive, it seems to cause more severe disease so be on the look out for that.
It's not the nice simple influenza that we had 20 years ago.
We're constantly faced with Streptococcus Suis here.
We are still hopefully in the warm summer days but our nights are starting to cool off a little bit and as we move forward into the fall time we're going start to see more of our bacteria pathogens, Strep, Glasser's, increased challenge in your barn so something to already start thinking about is how are we gong to deal with ventilation as we go into the barn?
There continues to be challenges with Swine Dysentery and Swine Dysentery like pathogens across the country, and especially in western Canada here where we're monitoring them closely.
Dr. Brockhoff stresses, it's not just PED that we're talking about.
He says we still have PRRS and more aggressive strains of PRRS than we did 10 years ago and we have new strains of Swine Dysentery and Swine Dysentery like pathogens and those are certainly creating biosecurity challenges so it's important to keep aware of what's going on.
Source: Farmscape