The Chair of the Canadian Swine Health Board says in the event of a disease outbreak swine traceability will provide the information necessary to mitigate the spread of the disease and go about eliminating it.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is accepting public comments until August 13th on proposed changes to Canada's Health of Animals Regulations to accommodate swine traceability.
Under the proposed regulations producers will be required to identify all pigs and, for the first time, all movements of pigs will have to be reported.
Canadian Swine Health Board Chair Florian Possberg says there are several disease concerns but the biggest is foot and mouth disease.
Florian Possberg-Canadian Swine Health Board:
Our information tells us that, if you can have an early warning system and trace where all the animals that have been in contract with foot and mouth, you can probably limit the negative consequences in some cases by 95 or 97 percent of the damage where as, if it was allowed to spread and you were not able to trace back the background, you would have a lot bigger issues.
Having a good trace-back system allows you to zone regions in terms of international trade, it allows the identification and clean-up of the disease in a much more efficient manner.
Quite frankly today a lot of units need to track where their animals are going just for their production records so having that information available in a data system hopefully will work hand in hand with producers' production records.
Possberg notes the international market accounts for about 70 percent of sales of Canadian pork so its critical that we have a system that will provide customers with confidence that, if we have a health break, we can get on top of it as quickly as possible.
By: Bruce Cochrane.