A Red Deer based swine veterinarian is advising pork producers who do not have access to heated facilities for disinfecting transport vehicles to return to cold weather disinfection protocols.
Transportation equipment remains one of the greatest risks for spreading the virus responsible for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff, a swine veterinarian with Red Deer based Prairie Swine Health Services, told those participating in an Alberta Pork PED telephone town hall meeting Friday freezing temperatures impact the effectiveness of the disinfectants used to kill the virus.
"Many of those disinfectants need about 60 minutes of contact time to ensure we have a good solid kill of this virus.
If you can't leave your trailer in a heated shop all night to allow that disinfectant to have time then we need to go back to our winter propylene glycol program and we talked about that a lot last winter where we add propylene glycol to the disinfectant to ensure it doesn't freeze.
If you have to take your trailer out of the truck wash right away our recommendation is you're mixing propylene glycol with the disinfectant and getting that onto those surfaces to prevent freezing.
A couple of huge things to remember about that, we want to use pure propylene glycol and not ethylene glycol. Ethylene glycol or antifreeze has a really sweet taste and it's very attractive to animals, very attractive to children and it's highly poisonous to both humans and animals so we don't want to use ethylene glycol.
If we can we want to use propylene glycol and pure 100 percent propylene glycol not the diluted propylene glycol that we would use on our dairy farms."
Dr. Brockhoff notes the older the trailer is the harder it is to clean so everything we can do to keep that virus out is critical.
Sorce: Alberta Pork