Get back on top of biosecurity, the Manitoba Pork Council urged hog farmers after porcine epidemic diarrhea virus recently broke out at a southeastern Manitoba barn.
Then a neighbouring barn became infected too, the province’s chief veterinary officer announced this week.
It’s waving red flags in front of the so-far-lucky Manitoba hog industry, which is one of the province’s major production and manufacturing industries and a key source of wealth to thousands in rural Manitoba.
“Our fear is that after a couple of months (of increased biosecurity vigilance), people get slack,” said MPC general manager Andrew Dickson.
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“You have to maintain your biosecurity standards. It’s the only way you’ll control this disease.”
The second recent case of PED occurred very close to the one found six days before in southeastern Manitoba. This is causing grave concern because the weather is about to grow cold, which makes the virus much tougher and more likely to spread, and the southeastern Manitoba is home to the bulk of the province’s hog production.
Many of the operations in the Red River Valley lie close to each other, making spread easy. The area’s barns are a mixture of farrow-to-finish, which mostly supply the HyLife plant in Neepawa and Brandon’s Maple Leaf plant, and sow farms, which supply weanlings to southern Minnesota and Iowa.
The two recent cases, the first since May, were both spotted by farmers after they saw worrisome signs that might be PED.
MPC is urging farmers to return to the highest biosecurity controls if they have let vigilance slip, or redouble their efforts to keep their operations clean and their interactions with others safe.
The MPC encourages:
* Ensure farmers and truckers wear disposable booties whenever at high-risk sites.
* Clean and disinfect trucks.
* Don’t cut corners when doing self-washes of trucks. Instead of paying for full-service washes, some producers are doing their own, but some are doing them in about half an hour. A complete professional wash takes two workers two hours on average and is a sign of how thorough farmers need to be if doing it themselves.
Dickson said southeastern Manitoba needs to go into the winter season with all measures in place and remember that the summer might have just been a reprieve from the disease, not the end of it.
