By Bruce Cochrane
The technical veterinarian with Ontario Pork reports, since April, there have been very few incidents of environmental contamination from PED in Ontario.
From January, when Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was first detected in Ontario, to April about 60 cases were identified but since April only five new cases have been found.
Dr. Mike DeGroot, the technical veterinarian with Ontario Pork, notes a number of different strategies are being used to track the virus.
Dr. Mike DeGroot-Ontario Pork:
Any new case of PED on farm is being reported to OMAF, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food so we kind of have a system there where if there's a new farm detected the ministry knows about it and lets the industry know that there's been a new case.
Another step that's being done is the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus Area Regional Control Project.
That's a voluntary program that producers who have a PED positive farm can opt into and let the industry know the PED status of their farm and be real transparent with their disease status and let service providers and other producers in their region know that they have PED.
It just makes it easier for everyone servicing that farm to take the proper steps to contain the virus on the farm there.
Through Ontario Pork we've been doing a surveillance system at the processing plants, swabbing all trailers that are backing up to the processing plants to see if they have PED virus on them or not.
The trailers that are being swabbed for the virus are trailers that are hauling pigs from PED negative farms so we're not expecting to find a high level of virus there but it gives us an idea of is there more virus out there than what we anticipated.
Dr. DeGroot says, after swabbing hundreds of trailers, very few samples have come back positive.
He says it looks like we've got a good handle on the number of sites that are positive in Ontario and it doesn't look like there's a high degree of environment contamination.
Source: Farmscape