Farmscape for December 12, 2016

A researcher with the University of Saskatchewan says the use of heat to kill pathogens is speeding up the turn around time for swine transport trailers following cleaning and disinfection leading to substantial cost savings.
As part of research being conducted in partnership with Swine Innovation Porc scientists are working to develop an automatable system for cleaning and disinfecting swine transport trailers.
Dr. Terry Fonstad, a Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, says the most exciting discovery has been the effectiveness of the use of heat to inactivate pathogens.

Clip-Dr. Terry Fonstad-University of Saskatchewan:
The initial work had showed that there was some ability to use heat, simply heating that would kill most of the bacterias and viruses of concern so we did a large literature review with the Prairie Swine Centre and VIDO.
VIDO, in their lab, has picked a representative sample of these bacteria and run them through the processes here and we've been able to show that heating to a particular temperature for a particular amount of time will inactivate these pathogens.
Our next step is to do that same research in real world, to do it with animal manure and aluminum trailers.
After that or along with that, because we're heating these trailers and cooling and cycling them, we have a mechanical engineering masters student that is going to be looking at what is the impact to the trailer because the integrity of the trailer has to be preserved through this heating and cooling process.
And we have to have heating systems that ensure every piece of the trailer gets to the right temperature for the right amount of time to totally inactivate everything in the trailer.
The advantage is, once they're inactivated, that trailer can go into immediate use rather than sit for four days or two days before use so there's huge savings there to the industry.

Dr. Fonstad expects a manual system for cleaning and disinfecting swine transport vehicles to be ready to demonstrate by March 2017.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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