Federal funding targets swine transport biosecurity

Thursday, February 12, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

The Canadian Swine Health Board has received federal government funding for projects to improve hog truck washing.

On Thursday, Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz announced a $351,000 grant to the board for four projects, including one to develop an application for veterinarians to enter data into a surveillance system and three others to research improvements to truck washing.

Ritz made the announcement in Toronto at the annual meeting of the industry’s export marketing arm, Canada Pork International.

One of the research projects involves taking a decommissioned trailer “looking at it and trying to better understand where the nooks and crannies are that are difficult to deal with and to properly clean,” says Gary Stordy, Canadian Pork Council public relations manager. Another aspect of the project is taking the truck apart and doing engineering on it and exploring “what they can do to improve the process,” he adds.

Another project in Western Canada involves researchers going to truck washing facilities “and reviewing their procedures to ensure the process is done effectively,” Stordy says.

The third project will take place in Eastern Canada, including Ontario and Quebec, and focus on the truckers themselves to ensure they are “essentially following a biosecurity standard or process to reduce the transmission of a virus,” he says.

Proper truck washing is important to help control the spread of swine diseases, particularly porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) virus. The disease first showed up in Ontario about a year ago and since that time there has been 75 confirmed cases on farms across Ontario.

Stordy says the surveillance and truck washing projects are to help control viruses and diseases in general in the swine industry. PED is just one of them.

The federal government release says the money for the swine health board is in addition to the more than $29 million it has previously given the board that helped the industry prepare to mitigate risks related to swine diseases, including developing and implementing on-farm biosecurity standards and best management practices.

Another swine industry organization, Pig Trace, also received about $1.6 million in funding from the federal AgriMarketing program for ongoing maintenance and implementation of the industry-led national swine traceability system.

Swine traceability has been mandatory in Canada since July 1, 2014. BF