Farmscape for December 18, 2013

The National Pork Board suggests heightened biosecurity and stepped up communications are key to the containment and eradication of a Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea outbreak that's spread throughout the United States.
As expected, the onset of colder winter weather has accelerated the spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea in the United States.
Dr. Paul Sundberg, the vice president science and technology with the National Pork Board, notes under the research tab on the pork.org web site a special PED section outlines steps to prevent infection and to contain the virus if infection occurs.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-National Pork Board:
One of the things that is on that web site includes the steps that you should take if your sow farm becomes infected and it's a rather simple check list.
The first thing you do is confirm the infection through your veterinarian and the veterinary diagnostic labs but once you have infection confirmed then what do you do?
It includes things like communication to your neighbours, it includes things like veterinarian to veterinarian communication of your herd veterinarian with others.
It includes biosecurity, it includes how to and working through the issues of restocking with replacement gilts, how to handle those, how they come in, how you close the farm down, how you clean it up, what you can expect as far as clean up goes, how you need to handle the sows for immunity, the best that we know right now and what you can expect down the way.
There's a lot of communication with feed delivery, with transport companies coming on and off the farm, with a number of different inputs.
Primarily it's communication and then a handling of the processes that go on on the farm.
Those are all written down and outlined as guidelines in our resources that are available to anybody on pork.org.

Dr. Sundberg says researchers are looking at possible ways this virus can spread and developing guidelines for prevention and, as important, guidelines for containment in case infection happens.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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