Manitoba's chief veterinary officer reports Manitoba hog farms infected with PED are making good progress in getting rid of the infection.
A total of four swine farms in Manitoba have been confirmed infected with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
The first case was diagnosed in mid-February in a nursery finisher farm in southeastern Manitoba and since then additional cases have been confirmed in another nursery finisher farm and in two sow barns.
Dr. Megan Bergman, Manitoba's chief veterinary officer, says cleaning up positive sites is a very labor intensive process but the earlier sites are making very good progress as are the most recent ones and the hope is that they'll be able to achieve negative status in the near future.
Dr. Megan Bergman-Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development:
Our producers at our positive sites have been extremely diligent and have been working very closely with their private veterinarians to move foreword to achieve negative status.
It's a pretty intensive cleaning and disinfection process.
We need to be very conscious of the fact that everything from ventilation systems, dust in the barn and even outside of the barn can contain virus and so it has to be an extremely thorough process in removing all organic matter, getting rid of as much dust as possible and then a full clean wash and disinfection.
Then following that we usually try to do some environmental sampling to determine how successful that process was so that we can achieve negative status.
The other thing we need to be really conscious of is the fact that our manure pits often stay positive for quite some time even after the cleaning and disinfection so we're actually doing some studies to determine how long it will take for us to actually have negative manure pits in these sites.
Dr. Bergman stresses biosecurity is our best method for keeping this virus out of our farms.
She notes we know the virus survives well in cold weather so producers need to be very vigilant in stopping anyone who doesn't need to come onto the farm from coming onto the farm and ensuring those who are required to come onto the site are following the protocols established by the farms and their veterinarians.
Source: Farmscape