OSHAB Chair Calls for National Strategy to Close North American Swine Disease Portal

By Bruce Cochrane

The chair of the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board is calling for a national strategy to work with USDA and other U.S. agencies to close the portal through which swine diseases are able to enter North America.

Earlier this month samples from six Ontario farms with clinical signs of vomiting and diarrhea that tested negative for Transmissible Gastroenteritis and for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea tested positive for Swine DeltaCoronavirus.

Dr. Doug Mac Dougald, the chair of the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board, told those on hand for a Town Hall conference call hosted by Manitoba Pork Council Friday, this latest development demonstrates the need for strategies to keep infections out of Canada.

Dr. Doug Mac Dougald-Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board:
DeltaCoronavirus is a coronavirus as PED virus is and as TGE virus is but it is a distinctly different coronavirus.
It has milder clinical signs.

The take home for all of us in Canada though is that we now have two new swine viruses in Canada in the last two months and I think that it's very clear that our national swine industry health is compromised now.

Our national swine industry biosecurity is compromised.
There is clearly a portal allowing new viruses into North American and Canada.

There's an urgent need for a national strategy to work with USDA and others in the U.S. in preventing this risk.

As we all know, if we've got a portal allowing these viruses into North American the worst case outcome would be a foreign animal disease so I see this as an incredibly urgent situation that we need to address before we have another virus in here.

Dr. Mac Dougald notes the clinical signs and modes of transmission of DeltaCoronavirus are similar to that of PED but, because it produces milder symptoms, it can be easier to miss.

Source: Farmscape