Some provinces are considering a voluntary sheep certification program to test for scrapie, says a Canadian Food Inspection Agency veterinarian.
Penny Greenwood, senior staff veterinarian, said she’s heard rumblings of interest from three provinces about adopting such a program.
Scrapie is in the same disease family as bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and chronic wasting disease in elk and deer.
Greenwood said the voluntary sheep program would be similar to the mandatory CWD program. Heads of dead animals would be tested for the disease, a veterinarian would confirm herd numbers and the sheep would require identification tags.
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The standards would be national, but the provinces or local producer or industry groups would administer the program. It would be designed to help give the CFIA a better way of surveying Canadian sheep for scrapie.
Greenwood said the sheep industry asked for some sort of flock certification in the late 1990s after a scrapie outbreak hit sheep flocks in Quebec.
The disease traditionally infects one to four flocks a year in that province, but 14 flocks were infected in 1997 and 29 in 1998.
After the flocks were killed, producers wanted to know how they could restock their farms with sheep that had minimal risk of scrapie.
Producers wanted a program similar to one in the United States, where flocks in the program could be given an elite status signifying they had a low risk of the disease.
Greenwood spent two years working on a way to deliver the program, but the project was shelved when she was told no producer in Canada would choose to join the program because of the prohibitive cost of testing.
She said Quebec later asked the CFIA to take another look at the program. While not committing to the voluntary program, the province said it wanted national standards written in case it or an industry organization was willing to administer the program.
Now, Greenwood is looking at more options to certification, such as live tests to check for susceptibility or resistance to the disease.
