Alberta's Chief Provincial Veterinarian reports the cleanup of three PED infected farms in Alberta is now well underway.
Yesterday Alberta Pork hosted a Town Hall Teleconference to update producers on the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea investigation and efforts to find its source and stop its spread.
Dr. Keith Lehman, Alberta's Chief Provincial Veterinarian, notes three cases have been confirmed in Alberta.
Clip-Dr. Keith Lehman-Alberta Chief Provincial Veterinarian:
The cases were confirmed on January 7th then there was a little bit of a break and then we had two additional cases detected or confirmed on February 21st and March 1st.
You all likely know that we do not provide location information specific enough to allow farms to be identified but, in terms general location, the first case was in central Alberta just northeast of Calgary and the second and third cases are located in the southern part of the province near Lethbridge.
All three farms are farrow to finish operations between 300 and 600 sows.
The first farm decided to completely empty out and is now empty of pigs while the second two farms are in the process of going through a cleanup and elimination type of approach for disease management.
I'll also note that a fourth case was initially reported as positive but upon further retesting it was confirmed to be negative so we consider that to be a false positive.
Those results are being looked at.
We've got some internal processes looking within our lab to see what may have happened but based on additional testing that was done and based on the clinical picture on that farm we're really quite positive that that was a false positive and no further action is being taken on that farm.
Dr. Lehman says, when notified of a case or suspected case of PED, the first priority is to contain the infection, which means stopping pig movement from the site, followed by tracebacks to identify any spread, then notification of nearby sites at risk and then efforts to determined the source of infection.
Source : farmscape