It was in 2014 that the North American veterinary community – as well as the global feed and pork industries – started to realise that viruses were being transmitted in feed. Porcine epidemic diarrhoea (PED) broke out in the US in 2013 and, by January 2014, the disease had arrived in Canada.
“We figured out quite quickly at that point that the outbreak here in Canada was linked to a certain feed ingredient, from the same feed mill, and soon thereafter a research paper was published by scientists at the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that showed the link was possible,” explains Dr Egan Brockhoff, a veterinarian at Prairie Swine Health Services in Red Deer, Alberta, and veterinary counsellor for the Canadian Pork Council.
“Then African swine fever (ASF) came along. Since then, in the US, Dr Scott Dee, Dr Megan Niederwerder and Dr Cassandra Jones and others have done a lot of work to look into how viruses can tag along in feed ingredients being shipped all over the world.”
What has been discovered
Among the many other studies, Dr Dee (of Pipestone Applied Research at Pipestone Veterinary Services, Minnesota, US) and colleagues had published an evaluation in 2018 of the survival of livestock viruses in animal feed ingredients that were, and still are, imported daily into the US.
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