Dr. Judy Hodge loves looking in people’s fridges.
Dr. Hodge doesn’t always like what she sees, she told delegates at the Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium in Saskatoon.
Among other things in her presentation, Dr. Hodge said it is important to protect your investment, whether it be the storage of medications or the cleaning of syringes.
“I have been very impressed with swine producer’s fridges, but there are still improvements to be made,” she said, somewhat generously.
She cited a study in which 60 fridges were inspected. A total of 43 per cent got a failing grade.
“It is wise and important to take good care of your investment in veterinary drugs. Vaccines will only work if handled properly.
“If you have a vaccine in your fridge and it freezes and then you give it to the pig, it’s not going to protect the pig from the disease you hoped it would, so you are wasting your time and money.
“Not all drugs are the same, some need to be protected from light, some need to be stored at room temperature, some need to be stored in a fridge. It is important to talk to your veterinarian or whoever you buy your drugs from to understand how to store them.”
Dr. Hodge, who works at Swine Health Professionals in Steinbach, Manitoba, said the most important part of preserving drugs in fridges is temperature control.
She referred back to the study.
“Twenty-two per cent of them did not have a thermometer to make sure your vaccines are still working when you want them to do so. Twenty per cent of the fridges were too cold; 10 per cent too warm.”
“Eighteen per cent needed to be defrosted and 17 per cent of the farms had drugs that needed to be stored in the fridge that were not in the fridge.”
She showed a photo of a 1,600 farrow-to-finish operation with $25,000 worth of drugs squeezed into a fridge. She has also seen thousands of dollars of drugs stored in a “$100 mini-bar fridge. We see that a lot.” She cited another study that looked at 126 fridges.
“Less than 15 per cent of them had thermometers and 33 per cent had temperatures outside the recommended ranges.”
Solutions include having a thermometer, using no more than 50 per cent of the space, not using the door of the fridge, not storing drugs on the bottom shelf or against the back of the fridge.
Dr. Hodge said contaminated syringes are also posing problems on farms.
A study of 23 farms, ranging from 400 to 7,000 sows, found 59 of 119 had syringes containing bacteria.
She said there is three-word solution to the problem: Wash, dry, disinfect. Dr. Hodge said on one farm there was still growth after three tries to solve the problem. “We couldn’t figure out where the problem was.” It turned out the culprit was the towel being used to dry the syringes.
“Once they started changing the towel daily, we got them down to zero.”
She said some syringes had obvious signs of contamination. These ones were likely put away dirty or wet. There were those that looked clean to the human eye.
“When we did the cultures, we could find the bugs.”
The solution is easy: Wash, dry, disinfect. •
— By Cam Hutchinson
