As part of research being conducted on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc scientists are working to automate the washing and disinfection of swine transport vehicles to reduce the risk of spreading disease.

The Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute is developing a hydrovac based system for washing the equipment, VIDO-Intervac is examining methods to ensure the pathogens are deactivated and the Prairie Swine Centre is evaluating the design of the trailers.

Dr Terry Fonstad, a Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, says the goal is to reduce the time it takes to clean swine transportation equipment and ensure all organisms capable of causing disease have been killed.

Dr Terry Fonstad-University of Saskatchewan:

We completed phase one, which is a pilot testing of a system to modify a hydrovac system used in the construction industry into a wash system for the inside of the trucks and we did a literature review with the College of Engineering and the veterinarians to come up with what physically would inactivate pathogens.

There was a lot of information out there from the veterinarian side of it how to manage them with the herd but nothing really of how to inactivate a bacteria and. when you thing about a bacteria that's about a micron, a thousand microns is a millimeter and so you could put a thousand bacteria on the edge of a dime and so you're trying to kill something that's quite small and it can get caught in small crevices.

What they came up with is they realized that if we could heat those bacteria to 70 degrees C for a certain amount of time it would inactivate bacteria, pathogens and viruses and so that was promising.

Also the results of phase one with the hydrovac was quite promising and so we moved onto phase two and that's where we are now.

Dr Fonstad says the hope is to have a manual system for washing the trailers and confirmation of the pathogen kill by the end of the year, at which point the project can move onto automation.