A Veterinary Epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development reports western Canada's pork industry has continued to keep Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea at bay.
With the onset of spring it becomes much easier to maintain on-farm biosecurity.
Dr. Julia Keenliside, a Veterinary Epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, told those taking part in a PED Telephone Town Hall Meeting, hosted by Alberta Pork yesterday, there have been no new cases of PED and there have been no environmental positives reported in western Canada over the past month.
Dr. Julia Keenliside-Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development:
For the month of April in Alberta we continued our testing.
We tested 428 samples, 144 of them were from abattoirs, 67 from assembly yards, and 115 from truck washes.
At this time I would just like to take a moment to look back over our testing program over the past 15 months and remind everybody we did start in January of 2014 and since then we've tested over 7,600 samples.
During that time we have only found one positive for PED and we've only detected the Porcine Deltacoronavirus on three different occasions.
And just for those folks that don't remember, when we did have positives for porcine delta coronavirus, we did find that there is a bird virus, an Avian Deltacoronavirus that's very similar that is cross reacting on the test so we do believe that those positives were actually from the avian virus, from sparrows that were in the facility rather than actually having porcine Deltacoronavirus in western Canada so this is all pretty impressive that we've tested this much and we still are not seeing the virus here.
By Bruce Cochrane