Call for National Strategy to Close North American Swine Disease Portal

US & CANADA - The chair of the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board (OSHAB) is calling for a national strategy to work with USDA and other US agencies to close the portal through which swine diseases are able to enter North America, writes Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 26 March 2014
clock icon 3 minute read

Earlier this month samples from six Ontario farms with clinical signs of vomiting and diarrhea that tested negative for Transmissible Gastroenteritis and for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea tested positive for Swine DeltaCoronavirus.

Dr Doug Mac Dougald, the chair of the Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board, told those on hand for a Town Hall conference call hosted by Manitoba Pork Council Friday, this latest development demonstrates the need for strategies to keep infections out of Canada.

Dr Doug Mac Dougald-Ontario Swine Health Advisory Board

DeltaCoronavirus is a coronavirus as PED virus is and as TGE virus is but it is a distinctly different coronavirus.

It has milder clinical signs.

The take home for all of us in Canada though is that we now have two new swine viruses in Canada in the last two months and I think that it's very clear that our national swine industry health is compromised now.

Our national swine industry biosecurity is compromised.

There is clearly a portal allowing new viruses into North American and Canada.

There's an urgent need for a national strategy to work with USDA and others in the US in preventing this risk.

As we all know, if we've got a portal allowing these viruses into North American the worst case outcome would be a foreign animal disease so I see this as an incredibly urgent situation that we need to address before we have another virus in here.

Dr Mac Dougald notes the clinical signs and modes of transmission of DeltaCoronavirus are similar to that of PED but, because it produces milder symptoms, it can be easier to miss.

Further Reading

Find out more information on TGE and PED by clicking here.

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