Enhanced biocontainment helps reduce PED spread in Manitoba

The Director of Swine Health with Manitoba Pork credits the creation of Manitoba’s PED elimination plan and a greater emphasis on biocontainment for the reduction in the spread of the infection.

Since Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea was first identified in Manitoba in 2014 the province saw some large spikes in the number of cases in 2017, 2019 and 2021-22 but cases numbers since then have remained low with only four confirmed in 2025.

Jenelle Hamblin, the Director of Swine Health with Manitoba Pork, explains biosecurity really is the key focus of the prevention pillar of Manitoba’s PED elimination plan.

We took a good look at biosecurity across the sector as part of the implementation of our elimination plan. Of course, it is site specific and farms and veterinarians worked together to develop improvements at the farm level but really focusing in on those entry and exit protocols and how things and people are entering the farm and what can be done to be sustainable but also effective. We needed to ensure that protocols that we were implementing could be done day in and day out and were not cumbersome for staff to take part in.

We looked at biosecurity through a new lens of, not only working to keep diseases off of the farm but working to strengthen the practices of biocontainment on farm even if the disease isn’t present. If we practice biocontainment day in and day out as part of the overall biosecurity plan, when a disease does enter the farm, we already have those biocontainment practices in place so, if you have biocontainment and you have a disease before you know there’s a disease, it really minimises the risk of moving it somewhere that you didn’t want it to go.

Those have really been the big changes that we’ve implemented on farm and we’ve seen the impact it’s having just by the fact that we’ve seen fewer cases of PED specifically.

~ Jenelle Hamblin, Manitoba Pork

Hamblin says the success of the biosecurity enhancements that we’ve seen implemented across the sector have helped motivate people to continue down this path.