A Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan says the livestock transport sector has been quick to apply the lessons learned for killing the pathogens that cause disease in swine.
In an effort to lower costs and improve biosecurity a multidisciplinary multiinstitutional team of scientists and engineers working on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc is moving into phase three of a project to automate the cleaning and disinfection of swine transport vehicles.
Dr. Terry Fonstad, a Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, says a key finding so far has been the value of baking to kill pathogens.
-Dr. Terry Fonstad-University of Saskatchewan:
From an engineering standpoint we needed our partners at VIDO-InterVac to tell us what it is that would kill swine pathogens and, as it turns out, if you heat these pathogens to at least 75 degrees for 15 minutes it kills most or all of the swine pathogens of concern.
I have to commend the industry on this and the fact that the minute that we told them, we took a phone call from the lab to get lab results that we were waiting for.
We walked into the room, told the industry that these pathogens could potentially be killed if you heated your trailers to 75 degrees for 15 minutes and, I'm not kidding here, they took out their phones and actually instructed their units to start baking the trailers that very instant.
So it was incorporated in most of Canada within probably 15 minutes of us getting a lab result.
That's really the industry being proactive in biosecurity.
If it increases biosecurity by 90 percent by baking trailers that's a huge jump for us and I think there's probably applications in other sectors other than the livestock for biosecurity.
Dr. Fonstad says this research has been driven by the industry which has really paid off.
He says they've embraced it and incorporated all of the answers almost immediately on finding out what needed to be done.
- Bruce Cochrane.
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