A pilot project underway in western Canada is helping livestock truck wash facilities step up biosecurity and improve their truck washing procedures to help reduce the risk posed by Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.
To help reduce the risk of spreading Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea provincial pork organizations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Canadian Pork Council and a team of western Canadian veterinarians have rolled out the Canadian Truck Wash Facility Registration Pilot Project.
Any truck wash facility on the prairies that deals with swine livestock trailers is eligible to participate.
Mark Fynn, an Animal Care Specialist with Manitoba Pork, explains collaborators developed assessment tools that standardize what we're looking for in truck wash facilities and the procedures they're using to ensure they are optimizing biosecurity and minimizing risk to clients.
Mark Fynn-Manitoba Pork:
We started off by setting up a collaborator group to develop these assessments and we've gone through that initial process and we're at the point now where we have a trial version of those assessment tools ready and we're rolling them out at truck wash stations across the prairie provinces and we've done quite a few truck wash stations across the provinces.
The next step for us is to come back together as a working group and review what we've done at those facilities, what we've seen and how we can further optimize these documents for broader release and potentially a national roll out.
Fynn says the program will help the truck wash facilities improve their equipment and procedures, provide greater assurances to the transporters using those facilities that their equipment has been cleaned and better protect the producers who have those trucks visit their farms.
Source: Farmscape