Pork producers across the province continue their fight with Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea(PED), as the province longest running outbreak to date enters its 13th month.
"The number of new cases has declined significantly, so I think we've turned a corner, but we're still in the outbreak that started October 17th of 2021, so it's been over a year."
Manitoba Pork General Manager Cam Dahl says the organization has been working hard to find the right solution to dealing with PED. The Manitoba Pork Council has formed a working group with industry representatives says, Dahl.
"We brought together key stakeholders in the industry, including of course producers from all parts of the province, the commercial vets from across the province as well, our integrated producers in HyLife and Maple Leaf, as well as the Chief Veterinary Officer, to really look at what we can do to ensure we don't have an occurrence of this every two years because that's not sustainable."
The group shared some details of the plan with producers at the Manitoba Pork district meetings recently, and Dahl says they'll be giving more information once it's complete.
"At our district meetings, which we just held recently, we gave a little bit of an update, but we don't have a document yet. We're going to have a document that outlines what that plan is, and some of the best management practices, but we're not quite there yet."
Dahl says the Council looked into what other jurisdictions have done to handle outbreaks in the past.
To give your listeners a little bit of a summary, we've looked at how PED has been addressed across North America, to see if there are best practices, and from that, it is really clear that trying to just live with the disease as something that's endemic isn't the best solution, and that aggressively moving towards eradication is the right outcome. So that's the question, how do we do that, what are the best management practices to have that eradication policy in place."
