By Bruce Cochrane
A Red Deer based swine veterinarian says the summer of 2016 could see the eradication of PED from Canada.
Alberta Pork held its monthly PED telephone town hall last week.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff, with Prairie Swine Health Services, says western Canada has had a lot of success in dealing with PED, the herd that was positive in Prince Edward Island is now negative, 14 of the 16 infected sites in Quebec are now negative and the last two are expected to be declared negative soon, 75 percent of the sites enrolled in the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board Area Regional Control and Elimination projects are now negative and 65 percent of the non-OSHAB sites are now negative.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff-Prairie Swine Health Services:
Not 100 percent of the Ontario sites managed to go negative this year but essentially 3 quarters of the sites have gone negative.
If this winter goes really really well in Ontario there is an expectation that the summer of 2016 could be our eradication year for PED in Ontario and certainly Canada could be PED free on all farms.
I think it's really important to remember that in Canada a number of our assembly yards are still positive.
We do have manure pits that are positive and so we all have to consider the risk as people finish up harvest this year and start dumping manure into the fields for fertilizer.
Certainly Ontario has a lot of assembly space that is positive for the virus.
Dr, Brockhoff says the good news is across the country organizations are working on projects to test removal of virus from the assembly yards and reduce risk and that work will be ongoing this fall.
He says if we can remove that risk we'll be one more step closer to a positive outcome.
Source: Farmscape