Since the end of April 78 swine premises in Manitoba have been confirmed infected by Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea.

Dr Julia Keenliside, a Veterinary Epidemiologist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, told an Alberta Pork PED Telephone Town Hall last week there still haven't had any cases of PED or Deltacoronavirus confirmed in a pig or on a premise in Alberta, Saskatchewan or British Columbia.

Dr Julia Keenliside-Alberta Agriculture and Forestry

We continue our surveillance programme in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

B.C. has discontinued theirs because of funding and the fact they have very few swine farms there.

In Alberta our surveillance programme consists of collecting samples daily on some premises and a couple of times a week in six or seven different premises that includes abattoirs or slaughter plants, assembly yards, on trucks and in truck washes.

This is completely voluntary.

I want to send a thank you out to all of our participants.

To give you an idea we get about 55 samples a month form our slaughter plants.

We get about 140 a month from our assemblies and we get about 50 truck samples a month and about 50 truck wash samples.

As of this year we've had no positives.

We had one Deltacoronavirus positive in August from an assembly yard.

We believe this was, once again, the bird Deltacoronavirus rather than the swine one because it was such a weak positive.

Saskatchewan has had a couple of environmental positives for delta as well as for PED over the past year but again they were from trucks.

Dr Keenliside applauds everyone involved in the surveillance programme, those who have been involved in keeping Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C. free of PED and those in Manitoba who have kept the virus within their province.