PED outbreak pace slows
Thursday, May 29, 2014
by SUSAN MANN
The number of new confirmed cases of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus has not increased in a month but Ontario’s chief veterinarian Greg Douglas says they aren’t able to say yet that the province has beaten the disease.
“I would love to say that we’re on the down track of PED (porcine epidemic diarrhea virus) but I think we’ll only really know when we get to January and February of next year,” he explains.
Mike DeGroot, Ontario Pork’s national biosecurity coordinator, says it’s good news the province hasn’t had any new cases in a month. “Our goal is to contain the virus on the farms that have it and it shows there’s some success there going on in the industry.”
Douglas says the absence of new cases since the end of April is due to changing environmental conditions. “The fact the virus now is being exposed to sunlight and warmth has had more to do with it than anything else.”
Another factor is the discovery that feed (namely the porcine blood plasma in the feed pellets) was a source of PED virus and the voluntary feed recall by Grand Valley Fortifiers “has allowed us to not infect farms at the same rate as we were back in February, which has been helpful,” he explains, adding farmer biosecurity and heightened awareness has also contributed to the absence of new cases.
DeGroot says the virus doesn’t survive outside of a pig in the environment when the weather is warmer. The sun’s UV rays will kill the virus.
But that doesn’t mean farmers can relax their heightened biosecurity now that summer is coming. DeGroot says in the United States, which has had the disease since April 2013, the virus still spread fairly readily across the summer last year and even hit the U.S. Midwest and southern Midwest states. “There’s other factors other than weather involved and the biosecurity procedures the farms have in place seem to be working here in Ontario.”
PED was first confirmed on a Middlesex County farrow-to-finish operation Jan. 22. Since then there have been 58 confirmed cases on farms mainly across southwestern Ontario, with Huron County having the most at 14 cases, while the next largest was Oxford County with nine. Although the disease has mainly stayed in southwestern Ontario, there was also one confirmed case in eastern Ontario on a farm in Leeds Grenville in February.
About Huron County having the most cases, DeGroot says “a lot of it is just connected to some of the pig flows and some of the ownership of the barns. Some of them are kind of linked together there.”
Also, Huron and Oxford counties both have a large number of hogs and are major hog producing areas for Ontario. “If you averaged it out it would be expected that counties like Huron, Perth and Oxford would have more cases,” he notes. Perth County had a total of five confirmed cases since January.
In the first month that the disease was active in Ontario, there were five confirmed cases. February and March had 19 cases each, and there were 15 cases in April. PED has showed up on different types of operations – nursery, finisher, farrow-to-finish and farrow-to-wean. The disease causes vomiting and diarrhea in pigs and almost 100 per cent mortality in nursing piglets, while older pigs can recover.
PED doesn’t pose a human health or food safety risk and doesn’t affect other animals besides pigs. But it’s considered a serious production disease in the pork industry and Ontario law makes it mandatory for the disease to be reported to the provincial agriculture ministry. PED can spread rapidly through contact with sick animals and through people’s clothes, hands, equipment and tools contaminated with the feces of infected pigs.
Douglas says the farms with the disease are still working to eliminate it from their premises.
“We’ve had some significant positives come from farms that are trying to eliminate the virus in their farms,” he says. “Producers still have to work very closely with their veterinarians in terms of how to eliminate it inside their barns once they get it.”
Douglas says farmers should work with their vets to aggressively eliminate the virus before this fall and winter hits “when its going to be more difficult; then the virus builds up; then it’s tracked out into the snow” and can be spread to other farms.
DeGroot says each farm is different and there are different cleaning protocols on each operation “just because there’s different age groups of pigs involved and a different flow of pigs on each farm.”
But the goal is to eliminate the virus on these farms over the summer and in to the early fall as much as possible, he adds. “I think we can eliminate the virus from many of these farms over the next several months.”
DeGroot says this is the time for farmers to be even more diligent about their heightened biosecurity procedures “if we’re going to make strides to eliminate the virus from the province. The summer is a key period for us to try to reduce the amount of virus that’s here.”
But there will probably still be some more new cases in Ontario. As an industry goal, he says he’d like to see more farms eliminating virus than new farms becoming positive. BF