Manitoba has first case of PED in 2024

A finisher barn in the province’s southeast is infected

Manitoba’s pork industry has its first case of porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) in 2024.

As of Dec. 4, a finisher barn in the province’s southeast is infected with the disease, Manitoba Agriculture’s website says.

For comparison, Manitoba had two cases of PED in all of 2023, and nearly 100 cases across the province in 2022.

In 2023, Manitoba Pork, the provincial government and other stakeholders developed a PED elimination plan after a string of outbreaks in 2021.

This plan aims to eliminate 96 per cent of PED infections in the province by 2027.

The recent lower instances of infection show the plan is working, but there’s more that can be done, said Jenelle Hamblin, director of swint health with Manitoba Pork.

“It's very much intentionally meant to be evergreen and reflective to our current disease pressures, our current production standards, biosecurity levels and risk that we have for the sector,” she told Farmscape. “It's very much a continual process and it's intended and it was designed to be that way.”

Canada had its first case of PED in January 2014 on an Ontario farm.

Since then, PED has also been reported in Albera, Quebec, and P.E.I.

Work on PED vaccine is underway.

In 2016, for example, the University of Saskatchewan announced the development and testing of a prototype vaccine to protect swine herds.

And in June of 2024, Canadian biopharmaceutical company PlantForm Corporation announced funding from the Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster to develop an oral vaccine for pigs to protect against PED.