Dr. Egan Brockhoff, the Veterinary Counsel with the Canadian Pork Council, said amid the turmoil surrounding COVID-19, the risk posed to the North American swine sector by African Swine Fever has decreased.
Although African Swine Fever continues to spread throughout Asian and parts of Europe, North America remains ASF-free.
Dr. Brockhoff, also a member of the Swine Innovation Pork Coordinated African Swine Fever Research Working Group, said COVID-19 appears to have slowed human movement of ASF.
“We think the level of risk to North America dropped because of fewer travellers entering the country from infected zones,” he said. “We look at other things though like feed ingredient risk. No questions there are other avenues for the virus to enter the country, and contaminated feed ingredients remain one of those.”
In the face of COVID, the industry speaks about the importance of biosecurity when bringing people into pig barns. COVID, in many ways, allowed dusting off some of those biosecurity protocols for bringing people into the barns.
“Also, take a closer look at how we handle employees that maybe had flu-like symptoms, weren’t feeling top drawer that day and closely review how we handle that,” said Dr. Brockhoff.
He said with many influenza prevention protocols in place for years, COVID-19 probably gave them a chance to understand what it takes to protect the pigs from a new angle. That brings a lot of value to the biosecurity conversation.
Dr. Brockhoff said despite the COVID-19 challenges the federal-provincial governments have, there is still activity on ASF preparedness.
From his perspective, the global ASF virus continues to spread throughout the countries that are positive for the disease for the last year. Reports continue for new infections within commercial pig farms. No question, though, that COVID appears to slow that human movement of the PED virus down.
“We always say this is a human-driven disease, and of course with less movement, certainly less opportunity for the virus to move with it.”
The Canadian Pork Council hosted a meeting over two weeks online, to bring all the emergency operations centers together. To make sure all were still on the same page, discuss challenges and opportunities that everyone’s facing, continue the ASF preparedness side, making substantial progress, said Dr. Brockhoff.
He said they are much better prepared than two years ago with the emergency operation centers in place. And they are working on everything from humane euthanasia methods to disposal, understanding where to dispose and where not, what type of disposals, how we’re going to man and staff those different events. Good conversations are occurring on business risk management, understanding how to potentially zone, and working on compartmentalization projects as well.
Should ASF break in a facility, the infected premise doesn’t concern him; they will take care of it.
“It’s all the other 98 per cent of hogs in Canada that worries me the most. And how do we handle and manage those? And that’s still, I think is a big elephant in the room that we need to do work on,” he said.
Going forward, Brockhoff said in terms of diseases, there’s no question that African Swine Fever continues to circulate throughout the world. And the risk is still here today. Producers need to focus heavily on their external biosecurity, especially around the introduction of food items that may contain the foreign animal disease.
“Continuing to focus your efforts on feed biosecurity security and making sure your feed ingredients are ideally North American sourced,” he said. “But if they can’t be, make sure there is a quality assurance program to ensure you’re buying as safe as a product as possible.”
Dr. Brockhoff said there are other foreign animal diseases, not only ASF. The great thing around COVID-19 is there’s much research to show that this is a virus that doesn’t enter pigs. It’s a virus that pigs can’t shed.
“It’s a virus that doesn’t cause disease in our pig population. If workers get sick, pigs stay healthy.” •
— By Harry Siemens