By Bruce Cochrane
Manitoba's Chief Veterinary Officer expects the first of 5 swine farms infected with PEDv to be declared virus free within the next month or so.
Since February 2014 a total of 5 swine farms in Manitoba, including 2 sow sites and 3 finisher sites, have been infected with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, with the last case confirmed in January of this year, and additionally the number of positive high traffic sites has been holding steady at 9.
Dr. Megan Bergman, Manitoba's Chief Veterinary Officer, says, while one of the 5 infected sites was lost to a fire, the remaining 4 are working toward being declared free of the virus.
Dr. Megan Bergman-Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development:
We are currently in a situation where the pigs within these barns are no longer shedding virus and so the most difficult challenge is to ensure that the environment itself is clean and all of our barns are making very significant progress on that.
What we did is, we wanted to come up with a protocol that could be utilized where we could declare a site that is negative after a certain amount of science based testing.
In consultation with the Manitoba swine industry as well as our swine veterinarians we've provided a bit of a framework for those producers who have positive sites so that they can get their farms declared negative.
The intent of that process is a testing procedure that will allow the producers and the industry as a whole to have some confidence that the pigs in those farms can be moved within Manitoba without spreading the virus.
We've got one farm that is very close to completing the protocol so we should have that happening, hopefully I think, within the next month and those others will continue to move along and everyone is making excellent progress.
Dr. Bergman says over 8,000 samples have been collected through Manitoba's ongoing surveillance program and high traffic sites continue to be monitored because, if we should detect a positive there, it would be an indication that we may have a spread of PED or a new case in the province.
She notes we're in a good position right now because it's summer and it's warm and dry but we'll have to make sure that our vigilance is still high when we hit the fall season and we see a drop in temperature.
Source: Farmscape