Farmscape for February 26, 2019

Alberta Agriculture and Forestry reports, despite the discovery of a second case of PED, the infection still appears to still be contained.
Alberta's second case of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was confirmed February 21st on a 600 sow farrow to finish operation.
The second case is not geographically close to the first one and so far, although it is early in the investigation, no connections have been found between the two sites.
Dr. Julia Keenliside, a veterinary epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, says a number of sources are being considered.

Clip-Dr. Julia Keenliside-Alberta Agriculture and Forestry:
We've continued with our high traffic hog site surveillance program in Alberta and that includes processing plants, assembly yards and truck washes.
We've actually increased surveillance at some of those sites and we've added new sites
to our surveillance program and, as of today, all of our results from last week have continued to be negative so this is telling us that further spread does not seem to be happening, at least not that we're being able to detect right now within Alberta and I would like to thank everybody who is maintaining high levels of biosecurity to prevent that spread.
In many PED cases it can be very difficult to find the source.
We're looking at the usual sources such as transportation links, we're doing tracebacks to follow up on all transportation links both to and from the operations.
We're looking at feed trucks, we're looking at feed and feed ingredients.
We're also looking at movements of people and equipment and at this stage we have not fond any connection between the two sites and we're not finding any obvious signs but it is early in the investigation.

Dr. Keenliside says even though testing continues to be negative, just because a site does test negative doesn't mean the virus isn't there.
She says we can't always detect every virus particle and everyone should be treating every high traffic site as potentially contaminated and make sure their biosecurity is in place.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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