Dr. Jette Christensen – Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network said the first quarter of 2020 saw a dramatic improvement in the swine disease status in western Canada.
Dr. Christensen said the first quarter was extremely quiet.
“I’ve seen all diseases, all syndromes returning to the baseline across the clinical impression surveys, across all the laboratory data that we collect in addition to the clinical impression,” she said. “Everything seems to stabilize at normal, so everything was returning to the baseline where we want to be and on average for the last number of years.”
The other excellent news is on the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, which is a coronavirus, not the coronavirus that we’re dealing with in humans, but another coronavirus. In Alberta, where they had four cases in 2019, the industry has cleaned up those four cases and returned to presumptive negative.
Dr. Christensen said in Manitoba, where they had 82 cases last year, they are very well on their way to cleaning up the whole situation. They have 75 of these 82 that have returned to presumptive negative. There are only three that are positive, and the remaining four are transitional, so on the way to presumptive.
Dr. Christensen said the report was in April, and since then, other farms have moved through the cleaning procedure.
However, she acknowledges the risk of PED remains a threat at high traffic areas, through transport, especially from other regions and from the spread of contaminated manure.
In an interview on April 29, Dr. John Carr International livestock consultant and now a senior lecturer with James Cook University in Queensland, Australia said, “What’s the positive thing to COVID-19? You could argue bugger all, but from a Manitoba point of view, a limited number of people moving around – this is the time to get rid of PED.”
Dr. Carr said he would argue that the chief veterinarian and pig farmers of Manitoba get rid of PED now because there aren’t the movements of stuff on the road. Movements and activities are all much more tightly controlled.
“There is no silver lining to COVID-19, but we can at least think about, we’ve got a major constraint on trucking, certainly movement of people and everything else. Well, where are the PED outbreaks, and stop them,” he said. •
— By Harry Siemens