The Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork says the key to avoiding bringing the virus responsible for PED into the barn is making sure biosecurity protocols are adhered to by every person every time.
Since April 29 ten Manitoba swine farms have been confirmed infected by Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
Mark Fynn, the Manager of Quality Assurance and Animal Care Programs with Manitoba Pork, told an Alberta Pork telephone town hall Friday, often when we talk about protocols, we forget about the objective so focusing on that objective will help people realize what they're trying to accomplish and how to do it.
Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork:
The protocols are really only as good as they're being followed and so compliance is very key and they need to be followed by every person every time.
Any time it's not followed it's a breach in biosecurity and there's a lot of farms within our recent outbreak that don't have a great explanation or don't have a very obvious explanation as to how things happened and it could be just one of those breaches.
So we really push it back on the barn managers to verify that their practices are being followed and enforce them and, if you see issues, following up with the staff and making sure they understand what's to be done, retrain them.
I find that, with people, the best way to help with compliance is making sure they understand the importance of biosecurity and what it means if biosecurity isn't followed if you get a disease like PEDv on farm or a bad strain of PRRS or anything like that what that looks like in the long term.
Source : Farmscape