At least two more states are seeing cases of the deadly Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus and the National Pork Board is urging strict biosecurity measures to limit the virus’s spread. Virginia and Utah make it 32 states that now have cases of PEDv, and the total even before those states was more than eight million head infected. National Pork Board’s director of swine health, Dr. Lisa Becton, says the changing season could bring even more cases.
“We have not experienced any significant cold temperatures, however they are coming and we know with the onset of winter that we may see our incidence increase with this virus.”
Becton says for now the National Pork Board is stressing biosecurity measures, “such as manure handling. As we get into the fall season and prior to a good, hard frost, producers are getting a lot of their pits pumped out and getting that manure and the fertilizer back out onto the grounds, and so as people are moving around farms and between farms, we just want to highlight a lot of the information that’s available at pork.org that cover what are some of the procedures and protocols that producers can follow to do these things in a bio secure manner.”
Becton says a Canadian study shows producers are tightening up biosecurity.
“A significant amount of people have changed their procedures. Not all of them have changed uniformly, but a lot of things like making sure equipment is clean going between farms, trying to schedule their work from a clean site so that they’re not transferring any materials.”
The National Pork Board is meeting with two firms that were recently granted commercial conditional license to market new PEDv vaccines. The Pork Board is working to develop a producer diagnostic test to gauge herd immunity while research continues to complete the approval process.
Source: NAFB News