Manitoba pork producers are getting some good news this holiday season as there have not been any new breaks of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus since Oct. 24.

Steady breaks of PEDV had been hindering producers since last spring, and Manitoba Pork reports that currently 56 of the 80 premises affected by PED this year have improved their disease status. Twenty-five premises have reached Presumptive Negative status for PED and 31 are PED Transitional.

Presumptive Negative means that a premise and the animals on it are considered negative for PED, with the exception of manure storage and handling equipment. PED Transitional refers to a positive premise that does not have any clinically infected pigs and has classes/groups of pigs confirmed to be non-shedding.

Glen Duizer, with the Office of Manitoba’s chief veterinary officer, shared this good news with listeners during a recent Alberta Pork Telephone Town Hall. “We are well down the road of getting the disease out of our area. At this point we have 24 presumptive negative farms and we would have 24 transitional farms. So, of the 80, 48 of them have been confirmed to have reached a stage where the disease is being cleaned up and, of those 48, 24 of them have reached a point where all animals, all staff areas, all contact areas, pretty much everything outside of the manure handling and the manure storage is considered negative for PED.”

Of the 80 infected farms, 25 were sow herds, 16 nurseries and 39 finishers, including about 77,000 sows and over 1 million pigs.

“We are happy to progress that far. We have a pretty good expectation over the next four to five weeks we’ll have a significant number that will move on through transition to presumptive negative so we expect that to continue to move in the right direction,” Duizer says.

Duizer predicts that with that progress “we should have the all farms reach Presumptive Negative status by the end of March,” adding that the swine industry has cautious eyes on “what happens in April, May, June season of next year,” the same time period when PEDV incidences started this year. Duizer is encouraged by tightened biosecurity measures that producers have enacted.

Manitoba Pork applauds the pork sector as a whole for its efforts to manage PED this past year. The organization will continue to work closely with producers to move more premises to Presumptive Negative status and to promote biosecurity throughout the sector.

For further information, visit Manitoba Pork’s PEDV webpage, or contact Jenelle Hamblin, manager of Swine Health Programs, at 204-235-4442.