Ontario's vet wants truckers to clean their trucks

Monday, April 14, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario’s chief veterinarian Greg Douglas has a message for truckers hauling pigs that are driving unwashed or inadequately cleaned vehicles – shape up or risk having regulations installed to remove porcine epidemic diarrhea virus contaminated trucks from the roads.

A small number of truckers are jeopardizing the whole pork-producing value chain because some transporters aren’t washing their trucks while others aren’t doing a thorough and effective enough job, Douglas says.
 
Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food (OMAF) testing shows that one in 15 trucks pulling up at provincial slaughterhouses and processing facilities are positive for porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) virus. “That one truck needs to clean and if it’s not cleaning and not doing it thoroughly and going on to other farms, that’s a problem,” he says.

Truck washing is one of the critical measures to control the spread of the deadly porcine epidemic diarrhea virus. Currently, it’s voluntary for truckers to wash their vehicles and many had already been routinely doing it before porcine epidemic diarrhea virus showed up in Ontario this winter. But Douglas says if they can identify the uncooperative truckers and “if it becomes apparent in the coming months that certain individuals, certain truckers are perpetuating the problem here in Ontario, you can rest assured that under the Animal Health Act of Ontario we have tools at our disposal that might help them with their non-compliance.”

Douglas says he isn’t considering using regulations now “but we can certainly take some trucks and trailers out of the system in the future if we think they’re contaminated with PED and they’re spreading the virus throughout Ontario.”

As of April 15, Ontario has 52 cases of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus since the first case was confirmed on a provincial farrow-to-finish operation in Middlesex County in January. The virus doesn’t pose a food safety or human health risk and pork is still safe for consumers to eat. The virus also isn’t a risk to other animals besides pigs. But it is a serious production disease for the pork industry causing vomiting and diarrhea in animals. The virus causes almost 100 per cent mortality in nursing piglets, while older pigs survive and recover.

Douglas says the truckers and some farmers too who’ve shirked their responsibilities to implement heightened biosecurity measures need to do better. “I am not really overly-happy with a limited number of participants in the pork value chain.” The vast majority of farmers and truckers in Ontario are “taking their biosecurity obligations seriously” but a few aren’t.

If truckers aren’t going take their biosecurity obligations “frankly washing their trucks” seriously, “they put the whole value chain in jeopardy because we increase the viral load throughout the pork chain and everybody is threatened,” Douglas notes.

In some cases truckers aren’t washing their trucks while in others they’re not washing them thoroughly and effectively enough and are skipping a few steps, he says, noting “it’s a striking minority” of truckers doing this.

Douglas says agriculture ministry officials don’t know absolutely which truckers are doing an ineffective washing job. “We can take guesses but we don’t know absolutely. Throughout epidemiological surveys it seems that certain individuals, certain parts of the value chain, are overrepresented” compared to others.

But “they (the truckers) know who they are,” he says.

OMAF isn’t doing the same degree of environmental testing it had been doing a month ago of, for example, processing facilities and assembly yards. But “of the farms we’re seeing coming back positive, it’s the same participants that seem to be contributing to the on-going increase in the numbers of cases in Ontario.”

Officials with the Ontario Trucking Association couldn’t be reached for comment. BF