Information sharing a necessary precaution says Ontario's chicken board

Friday, June 3, 2016

by SUSAN MANN

Chicken Farmers of Ontario is the first poultry board to sign an agreement with the province’s agriculture ministry to exchange information when there’s a poultry disease outbreak. But it won’t be the last.

Last month, the Ontario chicken board signed an agreement with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs that will be used as a template for agreements with other members of the Feather Board Command Centre, the Ontario poultry industry’s disease management organization, Chicken Farmers’ May 18 press release says.

The other members of the Feather Board Command Centre are: Egg Farmers of Ontario, Turkey Farmers of Ontario, the Ontario Broiler Hatching Egg and Chick Commission and the Ontario Poultry Industry Council.

Gwen Zellen, Chicken Farmers vice president of quality, technical affairs and sustainability, says because the command centre isn’t incorporated, each of the feather boards needs to sign an independent agreement with the government.

The Chicken board already has an agreement with the provincial agriculture ministry on sharing farmers’ premise identification information. That agreement “facilitates responding to a (disease) outbreak,” Zellen says. “This (latest agreement) is an additional piece.”

Zellen says the latest agreement provides a legal framework for Chicken Farmers and the provincial agriculture ministry “to exchange site-specific information to allow for a more efficient and effective response by industry.”

Last year’s avian influenza outbreak on three commercial poultry operations in Oxford County, two turkey and one broiler-breeder farm, helped to move the process of finalizing the agreement along, Zellen says. However, the need for an information-sharing agreement has been something “that we knew was an issue” for some time.

The agreement calls for the provincial agriculture ministry to provide industry officials with the location of an infectious poultry disease, such as avian influenza, Newcastle disease or infectious laryngotracheitis. In exchange, Chicken Farmers will give the agriculture ministry the farm locations, chicken numbers and types of production within a 10-kilometre radius of the identified disease hazard.

There are also provisions to ensure the information is kept confidential and only used for appropriate animal health purposes, the Chicken Farmers release says.

Zellen says in the past, Chicken Farmers’ officials heard about a suspected or diagnosed infectious disease, but wasn’t given an exact location.

The industry needs that information so it can inform service providers and others “to stay out of the zone so it can try and control and prevent the further spread” of a disease, she says.

Under the agreement, the ministry can tell Chicken Farmers the disease outbreak’s precise location, if it’s one of Chicken Farmers’ regulated farmers, and that means “we can be more efficient and effective in our response,” she explains.

The agreement Chicken Farmers signed with the provincial agriculture ministry is similar to an information-sharing agreement it signed in February with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. BF