Dr Julia Keenliside is a Veterinary Epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development.

She told those taking part in a PED Telephone Town Hall Meeting, hosted by Alberta Pork, there have been no new cases of PED and there have been no environmental positives reported in western Canada over the past month.

With the onset of spring it becomes much easier to maintain on-farm biosecurity.

Dr Julia Keenliside - Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development:

For the month of April in Alberta, we continued our testing.

We tested 428 samples, 144 of them were from abattoirs, 67 from assembly yards, and 115 from truck washes.

At this time, I would just like to take a moment to look back over our testing programme over the past 15 months and remind everybody we did start in January 2014 and since then, we've tested over 7,600 samples.

During that time, we have only found one positive for PED and we've only detected the Porcine Deltacoronavirus on three different occasions.

And just for those folks that don't remember, when we did have positives for porcine delta coronavirus, we did find that there is a bird virus, an Avian Deltacoronavirus that's very similar that is cross reacting on the test, so we do believe that those positives were actually from the avian virus, from sparrows that were in the facility, rather than actually having porcine Deltacoronavirus in western Canada, so this is all pretty impressive that we've tested this much and we still are not seeing the virus here.

Dr Keenliside noted there have also been no environmental positives reported in Manitoba or Saskatchewan, there are still no infected farms in Saskatchewan, Alberta or British Columbia and the five sites that were infected in Manitoba are getting close to being declared negative.