When an industry works so hard to keep a devastating disease from entering into their country, province, trucks, and premises, it doesn’t make much sense when government reverts back to old ways, say the swine industry people in Canada.
According Manitoba Pork’s weekly news alert, Pork Chops, on August 24, 2015, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) officially notified Manitoba Pork that, as of October 1, 2015, the Agency will no longer allow livestock trailers returning from farms in the U.S. to enter Canada at any port-of-entry unless they have been cleaned and disinfected as outlined in the federal Health of Animals Regulation, Section 106.
The rub here is that the change back to the discovery of PED virus, trucks entering Manitoba / Canada for that matter had to stop at an American wash bay, where industry people say they used recycled water, often infecting trucks even more.
Manitoba Pork says during the initial phase of the discovery of PEDv in Canada in early 2014, a temporary emergency protocol for empty swine trucks was established in Manitoba that permitted these trucks to cross the border to Manitoba cleaning and disinfection facilities.
“Now, over the objections of Manitoba Pork and Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, the CFIA has determined that PEDv in Canada no longer requires this emergency response,” says the alert.
Manitoba Pork is extremely disappointed with this unilateral decision by the CFIA.
“We are concerned that this change to cross-border transport protocol means that it is only a matter of time before we again find PEDv in Manitoba. As well, exporters will have trouble transporting the current level of weanlings to the U.S., since there will not be enough trailers and drivers to compensate for the backlog at the U.S. wash stations.”
George Matheson, the chair of Manitoba Pork, says tests showed U.S. wash facilities to be inferior to those in Manitoba.
“The wash facilities in the states were not conveniently located and it was determined that they were full of disease themselves so we thought it best to avoid them,” said Matheson. “It’s a question of animal care. We feel that our biosecurity procedures will be compromised and there’ll be a much greater chance of this disease coming into Canada and we have done such a fine job so far, as far as keeping it out.”
He says there’s proof in the fact that the disease infected only four farms in this province. Being pretty much the gateway to the west, there are no infected farms in Saskatchewan and Alberta. “We feel that had a lot to do with the biosecurity measures that we took here in this province so, it was quite obvious that what we had been doing was very successful in terms of cleaning these trailers, biosecurity was kept in check and this has resulted in better animal care due to less disease,” says the Manitoba Pork chair.
Dr. Kurt Preugschas, a Red Deer swine veterinarian agrees with Matheson that the planned change in washing requirements for trucks re-entering Canada from the U.S. will increase the risk of PEDv entering western Canada.
Dr. Preugschas, with Innovative Veterinary Services, told Alberta Pork’s monthly PED update, in late August, cleaning trucks in the U.S. to prevent disease from entering Canada sounds good in theory but in practice, the policy is difficult to apply consistently to the standard the industry is used to in western Canada.
“Dr. Leigh Rosengren published a report for Manitoba Pork Council in March outlining and comparing the risks in commercial U.S. truck washes in the upper mid-west versus western Canada,” he said.
Three of her key findings include there are insufficient American facilities located on major transportation routes with available capacity to realistically enforce the current CFIA regulations. There are very few facilities with the infrastructure required to offer the industry minimum standard for a wash, disinfect and dry of a live hog transport vehicle following a high risk movement, and number 3 the disease risk posed to the Canadian swine industry from cleaning and disinfecting at a non-Canadian facility is unjustifiable, he says.  •
— By Harry Siemens