The Associate Director of the Swine Health Information Center says, when establishing protocols to enhance biosecurity during the transport of hog's, it's important to balance the costs of the various options with their effectiveness. The Swine Health Information Center in collaboration with the American Association of Swine Veterinarians hosted a webinar accessible at swinehealth.org which looked at various approaches to transportation biosecurity, focusing on viruses such as PED and PRRS as well as other bacterial and viral challenges.
SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton notes there are many different options, some of which require substantial investment while others many not so the important thing to consider is what are the potential options available and how well they fit with each individual system.
Clip-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:
Some things that are available really are as simple as, can you reroute transportation and/or have dedicated equipment that goes to higher risk areas such as the plant but then also avoid or reduce contacts with other potentially more sensitive sites such as sow farms or boar studs. Other things can be having dedication of a trailer fleet to a certain sector of production.
We've also looked at different methods of washing.Do we consider just scraping a trailer, do we consider just baking, is it washing and pressure wash and disinfectants and looking at all of those combinations.Also, it really is important to assess what are the economic impacts because, if we dedicate trailers, that makes for less equipment over more sows or more farms so it could increase the cost.
Again, it really is a balancing act of assessing each risk for a system or a farm and then deciding what costs you can live with but also what benefits can be gained and trying to asses that all and integrate it within your biosecurity program.
The SHIC-AASV webinar can be accessed through the Swine Health Information Center’s March eNewsletter which can be found at swinehealth.org.
Source : Farmscape.ca