Moving towards a national biosecurity standard

Sunday, April 3, 2011

That's the aim of Stratford veterinarian Doug MacDougald, who feels that too many just pay lip service to this key element of best management practices

by DON STONEMAN

The wind blew down the sign warning visitors that the area around Curtiss Littlejohn's barns was a biosecure zone last year. The Glenn Morris breeding stock multiplier didn't bother to replace it until recently.

Like a lot of other cash-strapped producers, Littlejohn had higher priorities. Unlike some, however, Littlejohn didn't let his biosecurity standards slip. "We are anal about biosecurity," he says.

But not all see biosecurity the same way, nor are they paying as careful attention to it as Littlejohn, a past chair of Ontario Pork and current director to the Canadian Pork Council.

"Everybody pays lip service to biosecurity," admits Stratford veterinarian Doug MacDougald. "An industry battered with financial stresses cuts back on many forms of insurance. Too often in the past, biosecurity has been treated as insurance. 'Maybe it is necessary and maybe it is not.'" And MacDougald admits that presenting producers with written protocols has perhaps not been the most effective way to get them to adopt satisfactory biosecurity programs.

MacDougald has been part of a national program to make biosecurity on farms more effective. He is a member of a Technical Committee on Biosecurity, part of the Canadian Swine Health Board, charged with developing a national biosecurity standard for Canada.

The swine health board's biosecurity standard was published last fall. The dryly worded publication was posted on the Swine Health Board website in early March (http://www.swinehealth.ca/).

According to the précis, its writers aim to help the industry to "attain and apply the strategic objectives of bio-exclusion, bio-confinement and bio-management of swine pathogens and zoonoses in Canada."

Best management practices for producers are in the works and will be finished soon, MacDougald says. In his view, producers can be better trained and equipped to handle the practical aspects of biosecurity.

"Protocols are words. They are written; they are not easy to use to train your staff," MacDougald notes. He says the technical committee has examples of poster-ready protocols that producers can put up to train their barn staff. Part of the standard will be a producer self-assessment of the operation.

Ontario Pork is in the early stages of considering a program modelled after the Environmental Farm Plan that would see producers get some money to help them with such changes as modifying loading chutes in order to make biosecurity more effective on a farm, says communications director Keith Robbins. Circovirus "really knocked the stuffing" out of the Canadian industry, adds Robert Harding, executive director of the Canadian Swine Health Board, based in Ottawa. "It was devastating."

Industry leaders and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada have developed an initiative to control the disease in the hog industry with a $76 million budget. Phase one was the circovirus inoculation program, providing producers access to the vaccine and helping inoculate pigs across the country. It cost about half of the $76 million and it was very effective, according to Harding. Circovirus is under control around the world, and Canada was there first, he says.

But controlling the disease is not enough. "Let's not forget this is an ongoing cost to producers of a couple of dollars a pig," Harding says.

The Swine Health Board's mandate is to develop biosecurity programs and best management practices, fund research into emerging diseases and developing long-term disease control strategies. A system needs to be established to manage those programs.

While biosecurity is a major focus, Harding says "it is not our intention" that meeting a biosecurity standard be a prerequisite for assistance under any future program to aid farmers if there is another major disease outbreak. The program is clearly voluntary, he says. He considers the written standard "a reflection of what should be done and in most cases what is already being done."

"We are not going to reinvent the wheel," insists Canadian swine health board biosecurity co-ordinator Dr. Lucie Verdon. "We are borrowing protocols that some companies have used for 20 years."

Harding says that, during early consultations with veterinarians and producer groups, the board was told not to set the bar higher than in other countries.

Harding notes that technical experts "identified certain things that really need to be done. Surprisingly they aren't that dissimilar in every (geographic) area. But they were never pulled together. We want to say what we should do to encourage the industry to ramp it up a little bit. It is the level of support and engagement of the stakeholders that makes this thing work."

The stakeholders are organizations representing producers, processors, genetics providers, swine practitioners, veterinary colleges, and advisory groups representing interested parties that aren't on the board of directors.

MacDougald admits that kicking biosecurity to a new level is a tall order. "We know that we should have good isolation procedures and good testing protocols. But we have relatively poor use of those key tools in this industry today. That is the reality."

Effective vaccines laid circovirus to rest, says MacDougald. But the disease didn't emerge until 2004. Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome has been around a lot longer. The PRRS virus has been challenging producers since the late '80s. It is the most economically important disease they face.

There has not been a truly effective vaccine developed for PRRS, MacDougald says. The PRRS virus is completely different from circovirus.

PRRS is a challenge to producers in Quebec, Ontario and most of the United States, though not so much in Western Canada. MacDougald says Western Canada has "a biosecurity culture" and a lower pig density than either western Ontario or the pork-producing area south of Montreal in Quebec.

"PRRS costs $250-$350 a sow in an acute outbreak. That is a real cost," says MacDougald. He notes that a George Morris Centre study recently concluded that PRRS costs Ontario producers $40 million annually.

MacDougald is also involved in the Niagara PRRS elimination control project conducted by the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board. It is the first attempt to eliminate PRRS from a region of the province. MacDougald sees "great synergies" with the national biosecurity standard "meshing with what our clearly stated needs are in control and elimination of PRRS virus. If we can utilize these tools, it impacts the bottom line of the industry."

Littlejohn agrees that biosecurity can be a cost saver. He describes the Swine Health Board's biosecurity standard as "a way to benchmark your facility against other facilities." And he sees a bright future for high-health hogs because the cost of raising them without vaccines and medications is so much lower.

Producing commercial hogs is Littlejohn's bread and butter. He is also a multiplier for swine breeding company Hypor and that raises the stakes. No one walks into the zone around the Littlejohn farm barns without changing their footwear. The feed truck driver has a standing order to make the Littlejohn farm in Brant County, which is well clear of the mainstream of the province's pork production, his first stop Monday morning, after the truck has been washed and dried over the weekend.

"We don't let livestock trucks on the farm. We truck everything up the road a little over a kilometre to a loading point," Littlejohn says. Moreover, the truck that meets Littlejohn's truck is "washed, disinfected and dried before it comes to me. . . . And that costs me money."

Littlejohn thinks raising barns full of high-herd-health pigs, protected by a strong biosecurity system, is the wave of the future. And he believes there are tremendous cost savings associated with high- health breeding stock, in terms of reduced vaccines and medications. "They contribute significantly to a lower bottom line," he says.

That said, not everybody "gets it," about biosecurity, he says. He repeats an anecdote about visiting a stabling supplier in 2005 when he was building a new barn. Another producer came into the tiled showroom "straight from the barn" wearing his barn clothes and boots.

Nearly six years later, Littlejohn still finds that disturbing. And more than a little threatening to an industry that has been under siege. BP