36
Better Pork
February 2017
SWINE
HEALTH
ONTARIO
W
hen Porcine Epidemic
Diarrhea (PED) strikes, the
big question is whether to
focus on elimination. It’s costly, time-
consuming work to rid a barn of the
virus – but so is opting to “just live
with it,” as speakers on either side of
this decision told participants at Big
Bug Day 2016, an OPIC Swine Health
Board event.
When Smithfield Foods’ Midwest
region sow system of 16 farms –
53,000 commercial and 10,000 mul-
tiplication sows – broke with PED in
February 2014, the company decided
to bring in acclimated gilts.
They had additional breaks in De-
cember 2014 and December 2015, and
are now in an endemic PED situation,
said Dr. Whitney Lincoln, a company
veterinarian.
“After each break, it gets harder to
clean up each time,” she said. “It is
now a chronic situation; we’ve had it
for eight to 10 months.”
Lincoln attributes the company’s
endemic PED situation to various fac-
tors, including waning herd immunity
– the herd can only go about five to
six months before re-breaking with
the disease. Others factors include
larger farm sizes that offer more risk
points, on-site gilt exposure, high
employee turnover that hampers
biosecurity procedures and farrowing
barns that see negative pigs passing
by, or through, potentially positive
rooms.
“We’re just setting ourselves up for
failure by not getting rid of it,” she
said, adding PED impacts last long
beyond each actual break.
The company has seen a 12 per
cent increase in pre-wean mortality
due to chronic PED in that system,
and a USD$5 to $10 loss per market
hog due to higher feed conversion,
lower average daily gain, increased
mortality and higher sensitivity to
other pathogens.
Long-term sow performance is also
affected, including decreased udder
development, longer return to estrus
and higher stillborn rates.
Lincoln said Smithfield’s focus has
since switched to eliminating PED
and its farms in the system are now
provisionally negative.
The response was a different one
when a 2,500 head farrow-to-wean
Sunterra farm in Ontario broke with
PED in May 2016.
“Our culture is not to live with
bugs and virus,” explained Mark
Chambers, senior production manag-
er. “We wanted to contain this (break)
and not give it to anyone else and
decided elimination is what’s going to
happen.”
The company’s plan included
exposing all the sows, loading up on
gilts, and creating a two week farrow-
ing gap, followed by extensive clean
up and tightened biosecurity.
Sunterra’s biosecurity changes
included entrance barriers, lime,
lunch pass-throughs, new entrance
and protocol for supplies, relocation
of deadstock removal, elimination of
shuttle buses and construction of a
driver transfer platform. The company
found PED had arrived on-farm via
truck and an unwashed loading ramp.
The direct cost of the break to Sun-
To eliminate or not to eliminate
Consider the different approaches these North American swine companies followed. Regardless of
the choice you make, PED will cost you.
by LILIAN SCHAER for SWINE HEALTH ONTARIO
agnormark/iStock/Getty Images Plus photo
Swine Health Ontario has set a goal of eliminating
PED fromOntario swine farms by October 2017.