Manitoba Pork Council reports approximately one quarter of the province's pork producers have switched from needles and syringes to needle free administration of medications and vaccines.
Last November Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives introduced a program under which pork producers enrolled in the Canadian Quality Assurance Program are eligible for rebates of up to two thousand dollars for the purchase of a needle free injector.
Manitoba Pork Council quality assurance and labor programs manager Miles Beaudin says, of the approximately 620 farms on the CQA program in Manitoba, about 150 have purchased or are in the process of purchasing a gun.
Miles Beaudin-Manitoba Pork Council:
By not having a needle penetrate the skin of an animal you do bring at least three big areas of improvement.
Needleless injectors don't have needles so there's no needles to break in the animal.
Broken needles is a physical hazard and we try to do our best not to have broken needles in pork obviously.
Another big advantage of using needleless technology is that there is a significant reduction of disease transmission between injections.
Typically with a needle we recommend that you change the needle every 10 to 20 injections.
With a needleless injector there's no needles and you reduce disease transfer by 75 percent and that's not cleaning the orifice at the end.
We believe that if you clean the orifice at the end you could almost have maybe 100 percent reduction in disease transfer from one injection to the other.
The third area where there's a major improvement is there's a better uptake in medication from the animal so then the animal itself can respond better to the medication, equal or better than using a needle and syringe.
Beaudin expects money to be available under the program for the next two years and he hopes to see more farmers adopting the use of needle free technology.
By Bruce Cochrane