Farmscape for July 25, 2017

A program originally set up in Ontario to combat Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome has been has been extremely effective in dealing with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
An Area Regional Control and Elimination Program, established about six years ago in Ontario to control PRRS, was expanded in 2014 to control PED and associated Deltacoronavirus.
Lori Moser, the Manager of Swine Health Ontario, explains participants are asked to be transparent about disease status and information is shared among producers and their veterinarians so everyone can understand where disease is and work together to control risks.

Clip-Lori Moser-Swine Health Ontario:
It's easier to talk about PED and that is because there's a finite number of sites and we had already developed the ARC and E when PED struck so I'll start with that.
To date we've had 103 primary cases.
OMAFRA defines a primary case as the site where PED was first detected.
We've had 103 of them since the beginning of 2014 in Ontario and to date we have less than eight still positive and those sites are working on elimination.
It's a great tool with an emerging disease.
It's a little more challenging when there's a high prevalence already in the province.
That would be the case for Ontario with PRRS.
With PRRS I would say, we kind of think of it as a Swiss cheese approach in that there are areas where we feel we can control and eliminate PRRS but the challenge of numbers of sites and proximity of sites throughout Ontario makes it difficult to eliminate a disease that's already highly prevalent.

Moser says the goal is the elimination of PED from all farm sites in Ontario in 2017 and the hope is to reach or come very close to that goal with plans in place for those that might remain.
She says, with PRRS, the target is to focus on pockets where risks can be reduced for those areas.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork