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At midnight on Sunday, May 1, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) lifted the temporary emergency transportation protocol put in place in early 2014, and once again require livestock transporters to be cleaned and disinfected in the U.S. before entering Canada. Transporters arriving at the border unwashed will be turned away.
When the PED virus first began circulating in the U.S., in the interest of preventing the disease from entering Canada, Manitoba Pork and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) agreed to suspend Section 106(5) of the Health of Animals Regulation and launch a trailer wash pilot project. Under an emergency protocol, the pilot project allowed swine transporters returning to Canada from deliveries to U.S. farms to have their trailers washed and disinfected in disease-free, certified Canadian facilities, rather than be washed in U.S. facilities in regions where PED had become rampant. To date, the project has been extremely successful in keeping Western Canada free of PED, with only five on-farm cases of the virus found in Manitoba since the launch, all of which have been contained. Along with other strict biosecurity measures, this washing protocol has kept the PED virus at bay even though Manitoba continues to ship almost three million weanlings to U.S. finishing farms each year.
Canadian Pork Council and other provincial pork associations will continue to press the federal government to amend this regulation and allow transporters to wash at Canadian facilities.
April 2016/ Manitoba Pork/ Canada.
http://manitobapork.com
