Farmscape for May 28, 2015

The Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture reports, while environmental testing has detected positive or suspect positive samples of PED and Swine Delta Coronavirus, the province's swine herd remains free of the infections.
Since March 2014 the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture has been monitoring high risk or comingling sites such as slaughter plants and assembly yards for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, Swine Delta Coronavirus and TGE and, because all three are reportable diseases in Saskatchewan, also receives reports of suspect or positive results from producer-submitted samples.
Saskatchewan Chief Veterinary Officer Dr. Betty Althouse reports during the last reporting period Swine Delta Coronavirus suspect or positive samples have been detected at three sites including a truck wash, in stored feed and on an on-farm loading dock and the truck wash was also found to be positive for PED.

Clip-Dr. Betty Althouse-Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture:
The biggest thing to take note of is so far we have no herds or facilities with pigs actually infected in the province so any of the detections we have found to date have been environmental ones.
There have been a few suspected positives for PED over time and probably a lot more of Swine or Porcine Delta Coronavirus infections that have been picked up.
The Swine or Porcine Delta Coronavirus is a little bit more difficult to interpret because we do know that there is a bird Delta Coronavirus that's shed by sparrows for sure and likely pigeons and some other birds that will cross react on the test used for swine so if we have birds that are shedding this Delta Coronavirus it will show up positive on the environmental test so those positive environmental tests could be associated with shedding birds rather than shedding pigs.

Dr. Althouse says, although work is being done on a test that will distinguish the two, we aren't able to do it yet so it does lead to some difficulty in interpreting the environmental positives.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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