OSHAB applies principles of area regional control and elimination to Ontario's PED outbreaks

Thursday, May 8, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

One of the goals the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board has for its Area Regional Control and Elimination project for porcine epidemic diarrhea virus is to reduce the prevalence of positive sites this summer.

Lori Moser, swine health board managing director, says other goals of the voluntary project include enrolling and mapping all of the PED positive sites in Ontario along with assisting farmers “in the development of control and elimination plans.” The board wants to reduce the prevalence of PED positive sites over the summer in preparation for when the industry enters its “high risk season again coming this winter,” she says.

The project has already started and so far more than 40 sites have been signed up, she says. She adds they’re approaching the PED project as a “full Ontario project and we’ll map all the PED positive sites that enroll, and then we’ll look at how we can control and eliminate (the disease) across all those sites.” Participation in the project is voluntary for farmers.

PED first showed up in Ontario on a Middlesex Country farrow-to-finish operation Jan. 22. Since then, there have been 58 confirmed cases on farms throughout southwestern Ontario, including one in eastern Ontario. There have also been positive samples at other locations, including processors, trucker and assembly yards. Cleaning and disinfection are stepped up when positive samples are discovered at those locations.
 
The PED virus causes diarrhea and vomiting in pigs but doesn’t affect food safety. It also isn’t a risk to human health or other animals besides pigs. Pork is still a safe choice for consumers to eat. But it is a significant emerging production disease in pigs and causes almost 100 per cent mortality in nursing pigs. Older pigs can recover.

The PED project is very similar to another Area Regional Control and Elimination project the swine health board has for Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS). “We will use the same data base and mapping system; so the same way of communicating and determining location of sites and sharing that information,” she says.

But the idea with this project is to get the PED positive sites mapped first “rather than the open approach we used for PRRS, which is everyone can enroll and we map everybody’s site,” Moser notes.

The PED project is also different in its scope because the prevalence of PRRS is much higher in Ontario than PED, “so the approach will be a little different in terms of control and elimination but the concepts are all the same,” she says.

Since Ontario is the only province in Canada with a significant number of PED cases it’s the only one to launch an area regional control and elimination project. Other provinces are focused on trying to keep PED out of their jurisdiction or for the ones with one site “they focus on that individual site,” she says.

The swine health advisory board decided to do the PED project because “it fits beautifully under the work that we’ve been doing for the last four or five years on disease control and elimination,” which focused on PRRS, she says. “We have a framework already set up to deal with a control and elimination project so it made sense to just go ahead and add PED to that framework.”

The PED virus is secreted in manure, while PRRS or influenza are much more aerosol-borne and “when you don’t have to include aerosol transmission” that makes biosecurity more clear-cut, she says. “If you know that the problem is manure then you can get pretty focused on routes of transmission.” BF