SASKATOON (Staff) – The Sask-atchewan egg industry wants to be better prepared next time a barn becomes engulfed by disease.
Saskatchewan Commercial Egg Marketing Board chair Bert Harman said the outbreak of infectious laryngotracheitis in a Saskatoon barn in November was feared by provincial growers.
“We had never been faced with a situation such as this before in a large commercial flock,” he said. The last flock to be infected was in the 1970s.
With no set policy of how to deal with a serious disease outbreak, there was about a week of confusion and chaos before the government commanded that the flock be completely destroyed and the barns disinfected.
Harman said the egg board and the government are now trying to set up rules to outline what to do if another disease sweeps into a barn.
“We need better lines of communication. There was no established way of how to handle it, that’s for sure,” Harman said.
