With positive cases of PED now confirmed in Manitoba and Prince Edward Island, as well as in Ontario, Canadian pork producers are being encouraged to focus on the biosecurity procedures designed to protect their farms from disease.

Dr Chris Byra, the manager of the Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network, says if biosecurity procedures for entering the barn are followed we can keep diseases out of the barn.

Dr Chris Byra - Canadian Swine Health Intelligence Network

The recommendations have been focussing primarily on biosecurity, so preventing the infection if it's in the country or if it's at the slaughter plant that you go to you're trying to prevent it from getting into your barn.

The focus is on how you maintain freedom of the virus from your truck so cleaning your truck, disinfecting your truck, ensuring that you don't take the virus into the cab of the truck so around the vehicles, that's one point.

The second one is at the farm itself.

How do you prevent it if it got into your farmyard from getting into the barn and so the biosecurity procedures of entering your barn without bringing anything in become very critical.

The Canadian Swine Health Board, over the last two or three years have been promoting and encouraging biosecurity standards in the country and this is probably one of the reasons that we've managed to stay free of it for so long and it'll likely be one of the main reasons that we have a really good chance of eradicating this problem from this country.

Dr Byra notes biosecurity for one disease has the same benefit for keeping all kinds of diseases out of the barn.

He says, as we have built biosecurity around the two or three diseases that have been a real problem in Canada in the last couple of years, we have built a more robust system on our farms to be able to prevent any disease.