Farmscape for September 27, 2013

The National Pork Board says biosecurity procedures developed in Canada are proving helpful in dealing with a Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea outbreak that has spread through the United States.
As of September 18 over 600 cases of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea had been identified spanning across 17 states.
Dr. Lisa Becton, the director of swine health information and research with the National Pork Board, notes biosecurity protocols developed by the Canadian Swine Health Board have been valuable in addressing the management of PED.

Clip-Dr. Lisa Becton-National Pork Board:
A lot of the things that we're focusing on is minimizing the fecal contamination.
One area of focus has been transportation because we have to move pigs to different locations, whether it's to another farm, to a packing plant or a buying station.
It's trying to really implement things that can minimize or prevent the spread of virus from a potentially contaminated area to obviously a not infected area, so looking at coveralls, looking at disposable boots, hand washing, making sure equipment that comes on farm is clean, has down time and is free of fecal contamination and then also focusing on manure hauling guidelines.
Same exact thing.
One of the things we're focusing on is to have people understand there is a line of separation from where the farm is to where people that are working on the outside of the farms or doing other services such as hauling pigs or hauling manure.
We want to make sure that people don't cross that line of separation between the farm and the outside because we don't want that virus to be entered into the farm.

Dr. Becton notes there is a lot of good information available from a wide rage of sources on PED.
She says research updates, fact sheets and other information is available through that National Pork Board, the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and various university web sites such as Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council