Biosecurity Key to Containing Spread of PED

US - The vice president of science and technology with the National Pork Board says stepped up biosecurity will be key to containing the spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea, Bruce Cochrane writes.
calendar icon 4 July 2013
clock icon 3 minute read

Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was first identified in the US mid-west in mid-May and has now spread to approximately 250 sites from Ohio to Colorado and Minnesota and down to Oklahoma.

Dr Paul Sundberg, the vice president science and technology with the National Pork Board, acknowledges percentage wise 250 sites out of 60 some thousand in the United States is a very small number but there is concern with the spread of the infection during the summer.

Dr Paul Sundberg-National Pork Board

As far as we know right now this virus is spread fecal oral so everything and anything that producers can do to harden their biosecurity systems and their biosecurity programs to any fecal oral transmission is the best way that they can prevent the spread of this disease at this point.

Truck washes, truck cleanliness, truck disinfecting is one of the biggest things that we're focusing on right now.

Being fecal oral transmission the cleaning of trucks for transport as they go from farms to plants and plants back to farms is a major focus and something that I don't think that, whether it's north of the US-Canadian border or south of it, there can't be enough emphasis put on truck cleanliness and hardening biosecurity systems to prevent any type of feces from coming onto a farm.

Dr Sundberg says in some places the disease is spreading very quickly so in a couple of regions there are questions about the ability to contain the infection.

He says most of the country is fairly quiet so there is hope that we may be able to contain the disease this summer but we still have July and August to get through so its too early to predict at this time.

Further Reading

Find out more information on Porcine Epidemic Diarrhoea by clicking here.

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