Last month Agriculture and Agrifood Canada unveiled plans for a four tier 76 million dollar program to help hog producers deal with disease, particularly Porcine Circovirus Associated Diseases.

PCVAD typically affects young piglets with symptoms becoming evident at later growth stages.

Bill Schissel, the director of the Disaster Assessment and Analysis Division of Agriculture and Agrifood Canada notes the program arose out of disease problems which have caused severe economic loses, primarily for producers in Ontario and Quebec but also in other provinces.

Bill Schissel-Agriculture and Agrifood Canada

What the intent is to help producers identify whether they have the disease and support them in terms of inoculating some of their piglets and some of the sows to prevent the disease so the inoculation strategy is part of it.

But the longer term parts of the strategy are a research strategy that will allow us to find out how the disease is transmitted, how we got the disease and that sort of thing and the other piece would be the biosecurity best practices.

The intent there would be to implement a national set of standards to combat diseases, in this case specifically Circovirus, but also to combat other emerging diseases and the last piece would be to implement a longer term surveillance strategy so that we could identify these emerging diseases.

We're hoping to be able to roll out the inoculation strategy over the next four to five months.

And the longer term pieces, the research, the biosecurity best practices and the longer term surveillance strategy we hope to be able to put that in place over a four time frame.

Schissel notes, in extreme cases, certain regions and certain larger producers have suffered loses as high as 50 to 60 percent.