By Bruce Cochrane
The chair of Manitoba Pork says efforts to contain the spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea in Manitoba and clean up sites that have been infected have proved highly successful.
In an effort to contain the spread and minimize the impact of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea the Canadian pork industry has stepped up its focus on improved biosecurity.
Karl Kynoch, the chair of Manitoba Pork, reports the warmer summer weather has provided an opportunity to regain control of the situation.
Karl Kynoch-Manitoba Pork:
Earlier on this spring when it was still wet we had two farms that had gotten infected with PED and we had eight high traffic areas which consist of assembly yards or packing plants and these types of things.
Since the dry weather has set in it's really helped to be able to get control of it and we've put plans in place to try to clean these sites up.
The one thing that our industry has done really overall is a lot of the industry that has managed to stay clean has been making sure they're checking to see where the trailers have come from. Making sure that the biosecurity protocols have been enforced on those trailers and they've also been holding strict biosecurity protocols on their farms.
We've been very fortunate to be able to so far have five out of the eight high traffic areas come back now testing negative so we've managed to clean up some of those sites.
Those owners of those sites have been working very closely together with the vets and with industry to clean them up and the two barns that had the PED are also in the process of shipping those pigs out to plants that were previously infected in the U.S. and preventing the spread and they're also working on cleaning up their sites so our industry has really been taking advantage of getting the sites cleaned up that were infected.
Kynoch notes, as the weather starts to turn cold heading into the fall, producers will need to keep those biosecurity protocols in place.
He says we've proved biosecurity works so we need to continue to work very hard or we could go from a calm into a storm this winter.
Source: Farmscape