By Bruce Cochrane
In the wake of two new on-farm cases of PED, Manitoba Pork is encouraging the province's pork producers to take steps to close any gaps in biosecurity that may exist.
Over the past two weeks Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Development has reported two new on-farm cases of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, both in sow barns in southeastern Manitoba.
Mark Fynn, an animal care specialist with Manitoba Pork, says while producers have been quite responsive in increasing biosecurity, there's a lot to focus on and we are finding some gaps.
Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork:
Through the surveillance and some of these disease investigations on farm we've noticed some alarming trends in some of the biosecurity practices that we're not quite following.
We have some high risk sites within the province that have frequent contact with the U.S. and not surprisingly we should assume that those are positive for the virus.
But we have a number of producers that aren't following the best practices on those sites in wearing proper boot covers while they're on the site so they're not dragging stuff on their shoes back to their own farm and also making sure that they're getting a proper full wash done after visiting these sites.
Aside from that we also have some compliance issues with service providers that are visiting farms in that we're not necessarily insisting that they only come to where they're needed on the site which could be just at the edge of the driveway where they can exchange stuff like medications and that sort of thing.
If there's a need for service providers to enter the site such as feed deliveries then it should be a direct route from the road to those feed bins to service the site but we find that we have a lot more service providers visiting the site and some nonessential service providers even entering the barns.
Source: Famrscape