Pork Producers On High Alert for PED this Spring

The Director of Swine Health with Manitoba Pork says lessons learned from the province's 2021-2022 Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea outbreak are helping pork producers prepare for the next potential outbreak.The latest major PED outbreak in Manitoba, which began in October 2021 and peaked in January 2022 resulting in 129 farms infected, was declared over in late 2023.

Jenelle Hamblin, the Director of Swine Health with Manitoba Pork, says the 2021-22 outbreak differed markedly from previous outbreaks, primary in terms of the time of year that it occurred.

Quote-Jenelle Hamblin-Manitoba Pork:

The response did primarily occur in the winter months.In 2017 and 2019 we were in the thick of things between April and October.This 2021-22 outbreak was October through till March.This really was the main point of time when the outbreak was flaring up.We never fought PED in the winter before and it was an especially cold and blizzardy winter through October of 21 through March of 2022.

It was a nasty winter that year and that really made practicing biosecurity and performing effective cleaning and disinfection very difficult.We also saw in 2021-22, farms were taking a longer period of time to reach that transitional status, the status of where any animals on the farm that are PED positive have been removed or deemed no longer a risk for PED.

We attributed this to a number of factors, including delays in transporting animals due to these blizzard conditions.We weren't actually able to remove PED pigs off of farms because of delays in transport with snowstorms and safety.This was certainly something we had never managed before and learned a lot from.

Hamblin says pork producers and industry stakeholders across the board are on high alert coming into the spring of 2024 and are working hard on preparations for the potential of new cases of PED this spring.
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