Manitoba Pork Applauds Delay in CFIA Enforcement of U.S. Truck Washing Regulation

By Bruce Cochrane

The general manager of Manitoba Pork is a Canadian Food Inspection Agency decision to delay enforcement of a regulation which requires swine transport vehicles returning from the U.S. to be washed before reentering Manitoba.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has agreed to delay the resumption of enforcement until May 2 of a regulation which requires swine transport vehicles returning from U.S. farms to be washed in the U.S. before reentering Canada.

Since February 2014 as part of a pilot project introduced to reduce the risk of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea swine transport vehicles have sealed at the border and washed and disinfected  at certified wash stations in Manitoba.

Andrew Dickson, the general manager of Manitoba Pork, says research indicates most of the truck washes in the U.S. are actually contaminated with PEDv.

Andrew Dickson-Manitoba Pork:
The chances of the trailers, which essentially are free of the disease when they deliver the pigs to a U.S. farm and coming back, are highly unlikely to have had the virus but, if they go to a U.S. wash station, the chance of them picking up the virus increase rapidly so we felt it's much better to stick with the program that we had up to now.
The results tell.

We've had 5 cases on farm.
When you look at a scenario in Ontario, which had no wash program in place, the disease was in over 40 to 100 farms.

I think our track record indicates that our program is keeping the disease out.

We have a significant road traffic with the U.S.
We ship a lot of weanling pigs into U.S. farms, many of those farms are contaminated with the disease and yet we've been able to keep it out.

The only common denominator here is the fact that we seal the trucks and have them washed in Canada.

Dickson notes CFIA has committed to discussing the regulation and its shortcomings as part of a Federal-Provincial-Territorial Deputy Ministers of Agriculture meeting in mid-January and then undertaking a review of the regulation.

source: farmscape