By Bruce Cochrane.
The Veterinary Counsel with the Canadian Pork Council remains confident the virus responsible for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea can be eliminated from western Canada.
Since April 30 over 40 new cases of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea have been confirmed on swine farms in southeastern Manitoba.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff, the Veterinary Counsel with the Canadian Pork Council, says, while the situation has been frustrating, we do have the capacity to contain and eliminate the virus from the region.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff-Canadian Pork Council:
We've got to look at those core values within biosecurity, so how do we contain the virus within our different buffer areas, how do we contain the virus on certain farms and how do we exclude virus from entering new sites.
The core area focus really has to be on managing immunity, building up immunity as quickly as we can in the affected sites, reducing shedding as aggressively as possible, coordinating our biosecurity efforts to contain the virus and coordinating our biosecurity efforts to exclude the virus from new sites.
There's no question that there's a level of frustration out there that the virus continues to spread.
There's just so much virus in the environment now that even the smallest little mistake with biosecurity is turning herds positive.
There's no question though that we have the capacity to contain the virus and ultimately again move toward reducing the number of positive sites and ultimately eliminating the virus from our landscape.
All of those things are still very achievable.
We have the Ontario example and their success story.
We have a lot of positive stories out of the U.S. and so we know we can do the very same thing.
Dr. Brockhoff says there's a great group of people working to control the outbreak, including the province of Manitoba, Manitoba Pork, the veterinary community across Canada and producers.
Source: Farmscape