Because of the success of the environmental surveillance programmes initiated to monitor high traffic sites for signs of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhoea, those programmes are being extended in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba for another fiscal year.

Dr Julia Keenliside, a Veterinary Epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, told those taking part in Alberta Pork's monthly PED Telephone Town Hall Meeting last week, the success in dealing with PED is a testament not only to our producers' hard work but the hard work of everyone in the industry to work together to keep this disease out.

Dr Julia Keenliside-Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development:

It certainly is wonderful to be able to report that it's been a year and a half, actually 19 months, since PED was first diagnosed in Canada in Ontario and we have yet to have a case diagnosed in Alberta, Saskatchewan or British Columbia.

Manitoba has had about 5 or 6 clinical cases but they are well on the way to cleaning those up.

In Alberta we have had a few Delta Coronavirus virus positives on environmental samples only but I'd like to remind everybody that we determined that they were not from pig viruses but they were likely from a bird virus and we did not have any sick pigs and we're not seeing any more of those.

Saskatchewan, like Alberta, have not had any cases but they have seen a few more positives certainly with PED, TGE and Delta Coronavirus on some of their surveillance samples over the past year from trucks and truck washes so that does show that the virus is getting trucked into

Saskatchewan on occasion but again they're low positives and they have not had any clinical cases.

Dr Keenliside says we're seeing a much higher level of collaboration in western Canada.

She noted that as PED season rolls around with the cooler fall weather, provincial representatives will be getting together by phone every two weeks to discuss what's happening in western Canada with the surveillance programmes.