US and Canadian swine health officials are working cooperatively to deal with matters related to biosecurity and biocontainment to address the potential for the transmission of swine disease from points of high concentration, such as packing plants, sow buying stations and assembly yards, back to the farm.

Dr Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Centre, explains the intent is to provide standardized recommendations for truckers to help them minimize interactions at first points of concentration.

Dr Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Centre

We know with PED, with PRRS and there's a variety of other things that come into first points of concentration, come into packing plants, come into sow buying stations and places where they're congregated and, of course, they're going to bring along with them what ever pathogen it is that is endemic in that herd.

We have this concentration of pathogens in one spot and we know from experience that when trucks go to those points of concentration and leave there there's an opportunity for them to take those pathogens back to the farm with them.

That's an issue.

There's not doubt about it that the epidemiology of disease transmission that can play a role.

So the effort here is to cooperatively look at those points of concentration and the procedures that we can put into place to effectively isolate them, biocontainment and also then biosecurity and work on stopping that circulation and that transmission from the first points of concentration back to farms.

Dr Sundberg says this isn't an effort to eliminate pathogens from first points concentration but rather to minimize their transmission.