A Red Deer base swine veterinarian is encouraging swine barn workers to maintain a close watch for any signs of PED.
Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was the topic of a telephone town hall meeting Friday hosted by Alberta Pork.
A total of nine new cases have been reported so far across Canada in 2015, including one in Manitoba.
Dr. Egan Brockoff, a swine veterinarian with Prairie Swine Health Services in Red Deer, notes as predicted the number of new cases of PED has increased through the winter months as the weather has changed and worsened.
Dr. Egan Brockoff-Prairie Swine Health Services:
The Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network, CSHIN is still tracking things across Canada for us.
Quebec is up to ten cases now.
Nine of those are finisher cases and one of those was a sow herd and the sow herd is the most recent case and that that's just happened within the last couple of weeks.
One of the original cases is now negative.
That finisher site is considered negative.
Interestingly enough, those nine finisher herds, all but one of them were discovered on sampling that they are doing at the processing plant.
And so the clinical presentation within those barns was so subtle that the workers in those finisher didn't notice the pigs were positive until they had arrived at the processing plant and then the testing on the trailers at the processing plant had picked those up.
Dr. Brockoff the longer the infection goes undiscovered in the finisher barn the more likely you are to expose the transports that are bringing pigs to and from the finisher site and the more likely you are to back the disease up into the nursery or the sow unit behind so it's critical if you see loose stools of any kind in those finisher barns to look very closely at them to see what that may be.
Source: Farmscape