The Director of Health Services with Iowa Select Farms says his company has focussed on personal biosecurity and minimising people traffic to disrupt the spread of Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae. An Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae outbreak in Iowa was the focus of a Swine Health Information Center American Association of Swine Veterinarians webinar earlier this month.
Dr. Pete Thomas, the Director of Health Services with Iowa Select Farms, says in looking at possible sources of spread the use of one common rendering service was considered.
Clip-Dr. Pete Thomas-Iowa Select Farms:
Our primary thought about how it was moving in our system and maybe between some producers is during the mortality removal process with contaminated rendering trucks that contaminate the outside of our sites and then that bacteria being tracked back into the barn so that's the last task of the day. There's absolutely no re-entry into the animal space.
Most of our sites are set up with a bench where possible so keeping those mortality boots on the dirty side of the bench, washing the cloths that are used to do mortality removal daily, cleaning the hands, using those dedicated mortality boots and then showering out of the site before moving to another site affected. Another area of focus is making sure people are entering sites properly.
If we do have contamination outside of sites, you may have somebody who takes care of two sites and one did break with APP at the time or some traffic on the site, hence they've contaminated the site, making sure we don't drag that from outside into the barn.
Right when we noticed that we had an APP break we segregated our site managers so they're not taking care of multiple sites after the outbreak and we're also requiring two nights downtime for anybody going from an APP site so another site and, probably the biggest thing is just try to discourage any traffic on those sites and people from visiting those sites and also raise self awareness to the issue at hand.
Source : Farmscape