A year ago Canadian hog farmers braced for the worst after news broke that a highly contagious piglet-killing virus was confirmed on a farm in Middlesex County, near London.
Today, they’re calling what happened an Ontario success story.
There’d been hopes a year ago the lethal Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus, blamed for killing at least eight million pigs in the U.S. and slashing production by 10%, could be contained south of the border.
But the Middlesex case dashed those hopes and that outbreak was quickly followed by other Ontario cases.
Within two weeks of that Middlesex discovery, on Jan. 22, 2014, eight more Ontario farms in six different counties had confirmed cases. At the end of two months, PED had jumped to 38 Ontario farms.?
While the virus has no impact on human health, it killed close to 100% of young pigs on farms that were infected.
A year later, PED has now hit 70 of Ontario’s 2,000 hog farms, with the latest case confirmed Jan. 21 in Perth County.
But the number of new cases has slowed to just a trickle, with new confirmations now coming sometimes more than a month apart. “When we look at how that virus spread through the U.S., compared to how it spread through Ontario, I think you can definitely call Ontario a success story,” said Amy Cronin, a Huron County pork farmer and chair of Ontario Pork.
Cronin said steps taken by farmers and other segments of Ontario’s industry were the key to minimizing the spread of PED.
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