The chair of the Canadian Swine Health Board says it will be up to industry to maintain a range of initiatives that have helped swine producers improve biosecurity on their farms once federal funding runs out.
With funding provided by the federal government, the Canadian Swine Health Board was created to develop programs to help Canada's pork producers keep their herds free of disease.
With federal funding due to end March 31, 2013, the board has called on industry to commit the support needed to keep those programs going.
Canadian Swine Health Board Chair Florian Possberg says producers see the need to remain vigilant and proactive and the response from other industry players has also been supportive.
Florian Possberg-Canadian Swine Health Board:
Biosecurity is great that I'm doing it today but, if I let my guard down in a year or two years or three years, things have slipped a bit and problems come onto my unit it's really not getting the full benefit of the program so we do need follow-up programs.
We have programs where we've methodically put programs in place to reduce some of our significant existing diseases.
Those things are going to take time so we need to have continued efforts to make that happen.
As well Canada has had lapses in how we detect diseases coming from outside of Canada into our production areas and one of our initiatives as well has been to increase our surveillance of how we keep disease out of our units and early detection if they do happen to sneak in so it's very broad-based and it's really important to keep these things going.
By Bruce Cochrane