Farmscape for January 7, 2015

As part of research being conducted by the University of Manitoba and the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute scientists are assessing the infectivity of PED contaminated manure held in storage lagoons.
Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, a corona virus that typically kills newborn piglets within five days of infection, was first identified in North American in the U.S. Midwest in mid-2013, and in January of 2014 the infection was identified in Canada, in Ontario.
As part of a pilot study being conducted by the University of Manitoba and the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute to assess the survivability of the virus in manure storage lagoons, scientists have found the virus is capable of surviving in storage.
Dr. Ehsan Khafipour, an assistant professor gastrointestinal microbiology with the University of Manitoba, says the goal now is to determine just how infective that stored manure can be.

Clip-Dr. Ehsan Khafipour-University of Manitoba:
The farms that are infected, they were trying to find a way to eradicate the virus so we wanted to see under normal conditions how long it takes for the virus to not be viable or be able to infect the host.
Also it helps farmers to make informed decisions in terms of when to move the manure from those lagoons and then spread it on the land.
The second phase of the project which starts from January we are looking at the infectivity.
So far we have looked at the presence or absence and in 99.5% of the samples we have collected from the lagoons it was all positive for the PEDv.
So the question now is, if the samples are positive for PEDv, are they really viable virus in those samples, or is it just particles that have lost the viability?

Dr. Khafipour says the survivability data is currently available and infectivity data is expected to be available in March, at which point additional samples will be collected from the manure lagoons to assess the fate of the virus over the long Manitoba winter.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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