Swine traceability offers new tools to eliminate swine disease

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Harry Siemens ? Tracing animals back to the originating gene was something unheard of only a few short years back, but technology keeps expanding and improving that things not thought of before, the different industries can implement today.

Florian Possberg, the Chair of the Canadian Swine Health Board says if there is a disease outbreak, swine traceability will provide the information necessary to mitigate the spread of the disease and go about eliminating it.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency was taking comments until August 13 on proposed changes to Canada?s Health of Animals Regulations to accommodate swine traceability.

Under the proposal producers must identify all pigs and, for the first time, the industry will report all movements of pigs.

Possberg says there are several disease concerns but the biggest is foot and mouth disease.

?Our information tells us that, if you can have an early warning system and trace where all the animals that have been in contact with foot and mouth, you can probably limit the negative consequences in some cases by 95 or 97 percent of the damage,? he says. ?Whereas, if it was allowed to spread and you were not able to trace back the background, you would have a lot bigger issue.?

Possberg says having a good trace-back system allows the country to zone regions in terms of international trade, it allows the identification and cleanup of the disease in a much more efficient manner. Quite frankly today a lot of units need to track where their animals are going just for their production records so having that information available in a data system hopefully will work hand in hand with producers? production records.

?The international market accounts for about 70 percent of sales of Canadian pork so it?s critical we have a system that will provide customers with confidence that, if we have a health break, we can get on top of it as quickly as possible,? he says.

Karl Kynoch, Chair of Manitoba Pork Council recognizes the importance of this next step in the implementation of national swine traceability system and the positive impact that it will have on the pork industry in Manitoba.

Read more at http://www.siemenssays.com/blog/8122.html
 
 
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