A well-designed biosecurity plan is essential for managing and reducing risks to your livestock. Start by breaking the plan into clear categories with specific on-farm actions. For example, establish protocols for outside visitors to minimize potential disease introduction.

Next, determine the level of risk you are comfortable accepting and managing. This will vary depending on your operation type and can be categorized as high, medium or low.

Accurate, up-to-date records of animal health, data and transportation movements are critical. These records give you the information needed to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.

Finally, make sure your plan is practical and cost-effective. A plan that looks good on paper but cannot be implemented will not provide real benefits. For more information, refer to the biosecurity resources available on the Beef Cattle Research Council, Government of Canada and Verified Beef Production Plus websites.

Animal movement

Controlling animal movement is one of the most effective ways to prevent the introduction and spread of disease. Proper management reduces pathogen exposure, protects vulnerable animals and helps maintain overall herd health. Implementing the following strategies during calving season can significantly lower biosecurity risks:

• When doing chores, consider starting in the low-risk areas first and working your way up to the higher-risk areas to prevent any pathogens from spreading.
• Segregate high-risk or sick animals from the main herd to prevent disease transmission. Sick animals should have their own segregated area where commingling is reduced.
• Group cattle according to risk level. For example, the Sandhills calving system can reduce pathogen exposure in calving areas by separating freshly calved pairs and pregnant cows.
• Quarantine new animals for 21-30 days before introducing them to the herd to protect both the new animals and the existing herd. This reduces the risk of disease exposure and spread.
• Manage contaminants such as manure, soil piles and deadstock carefully. These areas should be positioned to avoid draining into water sources.

Cleaning, disinfecting and PPE

Maintaining a clean environment using the right tools and proper personal protective equipment (PPE) are essential to any biosecurity plan. Effective cleaning and disinfecting helps eliminate pathogens before they spread, while PPE protects both you and your livestock from disease risks. These practices should be consistent and thorough to ensure maximum protection:

• Cleaning and drying of a surface is required prior to disinfecting. Disinfecting uses chemicals to break down pathogens. When using disinfecting products, it is important to know which pathogens you are trying to eliminate, the mixing instructions and the recommended contact time for the pathogen to be destroyed. More information on this can be found on the Beef Cattle Research Council website.
• Clean and disinfect equipment, tools, trailers and transport vehicles regularly, especially after handling sick animals. Don’t forget items like bottles or stomach tubes, as cross-contamination can be a serious threat to newborn calves.
• Wearing proper PPE is imperative for protecting yourself from zoonotic pathogens and disease. Zoonotic diseases are infectious pathogens that are naturally spread from animals to humans. Salmonella is a common zoonotic disease that may be transmitted from sick calves during calving season. Some items to wear when appropriate for specific tasks include coveralls, boots and gloves.
• Practice proper hygiene by washing your hands. Hand washing is a critical step to prevent the spread of pathogens between animals and people.

Work with your veterinarian

Calving season is busy for veterinarians, too. Establishing a vet-client relationship ahead of time ensures the veterinarian knows your operation and can assist with animal health, medications and vaccinations when needed.

Calving season brings unique challenges, but implementing a practical biosecurity plan helps protect both your herd and your operation. By focusing on creating a biosecurity plan involving animal movement, sanitation and veterinary support strategies, you can reduce disease risks and set your operation up for a successful calving season.

The post Biosecurity during calving: What’s your farm’s risk? appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The animal was slaughtered at a federally-licensed facility in Alberta.

The CFIA said tissue from the six-year-old cow tested positive for bovine tuberculosis at an Ottawa lab November 29th.

The Canadian Livestock Traceability System allowed the lab to trace the animal back to its origin in Saskatchewan. The herd from which the animal came has been placed under quarantine until further testing can be completed.

All areas of Canada have been considered officially bovine TB-free since 2006.

Two cows from Saskatchewan tested positive in 2022 after they were exported to an American feedlot.

The post Saskatchewan cow tests positive for bovine tuberculosis appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

More than 190 herds have been infected across the U.S. since March, along with 13 dairy and poultry farm workers, according to federal data. No human cases were confirmed in California, and the virus remains a low risk to the general public.

Efforts to prevent the spread of the virus were being seen at state fairs around the U.S., including he use of fake cows for milking demonstrations, increased testing, quarantines and cancelations of events in some states, according to reports.

Meanwhile, the Philippines lifted its ban on importing domesticated and wild birds, including poultry products, from California and South Dakota, Manila’s farm ministry said on Aug. 31. The Philippines imposed the temporary ban on California in January and on South Dakota in November last year after confirmed outbreaks of H5N1 subtype of the highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has killed millions of infected birds and poultry.

In Canada, there have yet to be any confirmed cases of bird flu in dairy cattle with the last outbreak in a commercial poultry flock coming six months ago. However, cases in wild birds continue to be found. In it’s Sep. 4 report the World Organisation for Animal Health revealed cases of bird flu in wild birds in Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Ontario. Only one primary control zone for highly pathogenetic avian influenza (HPAI) remains active in Canada. That zone involves a premises in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, where the presence of HPAI was found in a backyard poultry flock on November 15, 2023.

The post Bird flu spreads to California dairy cows appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The project was focused on bacteria and viruses that can contribute to bovine respiratory disease (BRD). It found antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in just two per cent of sampled calves from 27 herds throughout the four western provinces.

Only three calves were found hosting microbes resistant to more than two types of antimicrobials.

The results are consistent with similar research, wrote lead researcher and University of Saskatchewan professor Cheryl Waldner in an email. However, her study had more focus on sampling on the farm of origin, before feedlot entry, than on other projects.

“Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is one of the most important causes of sickness and death loss in beef cattle, both in cow-calf herds and in feedlots,” she said.

Pneumonia is the most common issue producers will see in their herds, she added, and understanding the bacteria and viruses at the root of the infection can help prevent illness through vaccination, or set up the producer for success if it does occur.

“We can provide better advice for treating calves that get sick near the time of weaning,” she said. “It further helps us design programs to best use the vaccines we have to prevent respiratory disease in the beef industry and to identify gaps where we might need new vaccines.”

Waldner’s research team is also looking at bacteria and viruses present in calves upon arrival at the feedlot and how those organisms change once calves are on feed.

“Again, this information can be used to help beef producers and veterinarians inform respiratory disease management, including vaccination and antibiotic use.”

Details

The project had four main objectives. They included quantifying current cow-calf antibiotic resistance in respiratory pathogens through traditional culture techniques, assessing potential association between antibiotic use in cow-calf herds and antibiotic resistance in BRD pathogens in calves before entering the feedlot, and evaluating emerging tools to potentially improve cost-effective surveillance.

They also hoped to identify any management practices that could make finding specific BRD bacteria or viruses more likely.

“Management factors such as calving earlier, more confinement of animals at calving and handling cow-calf pairs more often can be associated with an increased risk of BRD,” she said.

“These producers would be most likely to benefit from working with their veterinarians to review their vaccination programs for BRD, especially in mother cows and nursing calves.”

Researchers also tried to find management practices that could be linked with antimicrobial resistance development in BRD pathogens found in calves. “However, the occurrence of AMR was so low that there wasn’t enough data to examine this question,” Waldner said.

They started by collecting nasal swabs from 26 calves at or near weaning in most of the 27 participating herds. These samples were cultured in the lab to identify respiratory pathogens.

Those pathogens were then tested for antimicrobial resistance through standard techniques. The resistance found was then compared to what had been previously reported for cow-calf herds and feedlot cattle in Western Canada.

Metagenomic sequencing was performed on some of the samples. This technique expands the range of bacteria and viruses researchers can test for.

In this case, it was used to describe additional respiratory bacteria of interest, antimicrobial resistance genes in those bacteria, genes associated with bacterial serotype (groups of micro-organisms with similar surface structures), and respiratory viruses.

“The metagenomic sequencing tools we used in this study looked for DNA and RNA from a wide variety of organisms that can potentially cause disease,” Waldner said. “This approach has some advantages over traditional laboratory tests as it allows us to look for many different types of bacteria or viruses with a single test.”

The analysis also helps indicate how likely those organisms are to cause disease, she noted.

The project was funded by the Alberta Beef Producers, Beef Cattle Research Council, the Canadian Beef Cattle Check-Off, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture.

The post Antibiotic resistance in weaned calves a rarity appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The three eastern German wild boar were tracked far from where they were first spotted and tagged. None were fazed by natural barriers that would put off other animals.

Dietmar, for example, tended to range from Poland, which has a significant and widespread outbreak of African swine fever, and Germany, crossing rivers and wandering through forests on both sides of the frontier, said Egbert Gleich, a wild pig eradication researcher with the Brandenburg State Forest.

Why it matters: German issues with ASF in wild pigs have the Canadian pork sector worried about our own invasive populations and their threat as a disease vector.

Gleich was one of the speakers at the first Canadian Wild Pig Summit in Brandon last month.

For Germany, that leaky border is a worry.

“We must stop the Polish disease front, and we must eradicate ASF in Germany,” said Gleich, who has been fighting the spread of the disease for years since it first crossed into Germany from Poland.

Wild pigs have proven a potent vector and reservoir of the disease. ASF has spread from Asia to Europe’s Atlantic coast through wild swine and commercial pig movement in areas with weak biosecurity.

While the disease is new to Western Europe, wild pigs are not. Wild boar are native to Europe, unlike Canada, where they are a serious invasive species threat.

German efforts at ASF eradication involve hitting hot spots of ASF infection and areas with high populations of wild pigs. If ASF-infected pigs can be eliminated, and wild pig numbers kept low, the Germans believe the disease’s spread can be stopped.

Cindy, Rudiger and Dietmar were followed by researchers to get better insight into the life of the animals.

Gleich said previous assumptions about wild pig ranges were overturned through their observation. The three wandered much farther than expected.

Females were believed to restrict themselves to a 3,000-acre zone, but Cindy wandered over 10 kilometres and was shot two kilometres from where she was first spotted.

The males are the true wandering spirits, such as the border-hopping Dietmar.

Wayne Lees, the head of Manitoba’s Squeal on Pig program, has studied the German research and said it verifies their observations about the roaming nature of wild pigs.

“I was amazed by the wide home range of some of these pigs,” said Lees.

The post Where the wild pigs roam appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

At first, they dealt with it as suggested by worldwide veterinary authorities. Believing the gilts were over the illness, they were sent into four sow barns. Within a month, the company had 10,500 infected sows on its hands.

Every day, dozens of mature sows died. Gilts were aborting litters. Staff were becoming exhausted from caring for sick pigs.

It was a nightmare.

Why it matters: Even narrow biosecurity gaps can become big problems in the hog barn.

This went on for four years, causing millions of dollars in damage, thousands of pig deaths and pushing employees to the brink. One barn was taken out of production, and Maple Leaf almost despaired of safely repopulating it after having to depopulate it three times from 2020 to 2023.

Since the pigs themselves didn’t seem to be the underlying root of infection, the investigation turned to other organisms.

“We were collecting bees. We were collecting flies. We were collecting mice, anything that could potentially carry the disease,” said Maple Leaf animal health manager LeeAnn Peters.

Bacterial culture tests were also conducted with workers. Nothing was discovered.

Then came a stroke of luck. A discovery from an infected barn run by a different company in Alberta suggested a possible cause: a positive finding for Streptococcus zooepidemicus on employee masks.

“After four years of fighting this, my mind is blown,” said Peters, recalling her reaction to the news.

Could a human carrier have repeatedly infected the pigs and yet appear uninfected? Yes, it turned out. A worker was carrying the disease and likely had been since the beginning.

Ironically, Peters recalled, the worker was “super-healthy” and hadn’t had any antibiotics for at least seven years. He was asymptomatic, without signs of Streptococcus zooepidemicus, which is rare in humans.

And, like many barn staff, he occasionally spit or sneezed inside the pens.

“I think some of these things are more common across our industry than we may care to admit,” said Peters.

Once the employee learned he was a carrier, his infection was addressed and the barn was put back into production.

With that lesson learned, the next barn that suffers a human-spread outbreak of the disease should have an easier time cracking the cause, she added.

At the time of the outbreaks, there were no approved genetic tests to spot a sick person. There was a good veterinary test for animal outbreaks, but a doctor and lab were needed to obtain and identify human samples.

Those samples could then be compared to a veterinary analysis to see if bacteria found in the person matched that in the barn. Now a quicker way has been developed.

Guarding against infection

Peters’s story is the sort of production nightmare that could bankrupt a smaller producer and should prompt all producers to toughen protocols for assessing risks from employees. Risks of Streptococcus zooepidemicus could come from:

• Employees working at second jobs that involve livestock or other animals.
• Employees not wearing proper protective equipment.
• People in barns spitting, sneezing or in other ways spreading human matter.
• Visitors to barns.
• Workers eating uncooked or unpasteurized foods.
• Employees travelling to countries with problems from the disease.
• Barn waste systems that mingle human waste and barn waste.

– Ed White is a reporter with the Western Producer.

The post Detective work solves swine sickness mystery appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“These projects and the knowledge that we’re aiming to achieve through this research will contribute to the bottom line of pork producers and processors and will also build in Canada’s global leadership in pork production,” said Daniel Ramage, general manager of Swine Innovation Porc.

On Feb. 20, the federal government pledged up to $10.6 million for hog sector research. The funds, to be stewarded by Swine Innovation Porc, will launch the fourth hog research cluster under the federal agri-science program, part of the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a federal news release said.

It is the latest in several cluster announcements made by the federal government. Clusters for canola and pulses have also been announced.

Research on the table

SIP, a research and development non-profit directed by the federal and provincial pork councils, also co-ordinated the previous three hog clusters.

The group says it will spend up to $20.1 million in combined government and industry funds over the next five years on the sector’s research priorities. These include climate change and the environment, sector resilience, economic growth and communication and knowledge transfer, a release said.

Planned research includes two vaccine-related projects, said Ramage. One involves testing a new oral delivery method for vaccines. The other is related to a new vaccine for PEDv, which has been a scourge for Manitoba’s pork sector since 2017.

Canadian producers have access to PEDv vaccines, but they haven’t been ideal. One PEDv outbreak brought vaccine from Saskatchewan’s VIDO-InterVac to Manitoba farms, Jenelle Hamblin, Manitoba Pork’s swine health director told the Co-operator last summer. However, it was expensive and had little benefit for animals with no previous exposure to PEDv.

Another U.S.-based vaccine is available, Hamblin said, but import requires special permission from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

Researchers will also look at antimicrobial alternatives, specifically tools to improve gut health, Ramage said. This may include amino acids or probiotics.

The industry has been pressured to reduce antibiotic use. Manitoba Pork told its members in 2022 that the sector is unlikely to escape regulation on the issue due to global concern about antibiotic resistant bacteria and their effect on human health.

Under the heading of emissions and environment, projects will look at feed formulations and strategies to reduce phosphorus runoff and nitrogen concentration in manure, SIP said in an explainer document.

Ramage said they’d also look at manure storage and digesters to reduce environmental impact and understand the economics around such practices. Other research will explore genetics, feeding strategies, meat quality and other topics.

The post PEDv vaccine among funded research projects appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Response plans will be implemented. Quarantines will be imposed and animal movements locked down. Biosecurity will ramp up to crisis levels. Information and updates will flow between federal and provincial chief veterinary offices and the industry.

Further from ground zero, zoning agreements are designed to keep business and trade running as normally as possible.

But when it comes to financial support for farmers after an ASF detection, the Canadian Pork Council would like more details set in stone.

“Is AAFC (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) fully committed to be behind us on Day 1? Because that Day 1 matters a lot,” said Dr. Egan Brockhoff, veterinary counsellor for the industry group. “Farmers need to know they have cash to be able to continue to feed the pigs, to be able to pay their staff, to be able to purchase feed, so on and so forth.”

Why it matters: An African swine fever detection could devastate the hog sector, and industry says farmers need to know they’ll have a financial safety net if it happens.

Canada just finished its latest test of ASF readiness. On Feb. 12, Animal Health Canada hosted a tabletop exercise simulating the aftermath of a confirmed infection. It built on a previous exercise run by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in November, which focused on the critical first hours of an outbreak.

Overall disease response was part of that exercise, as were communications throughout the value chain and between government personnel.

The CFIA held its own exercises in January and February. In January, the agency looked at the readiness of provincial and federal laboratories. In February, attention turned to meat return policies and industry contingencies should ASF lock down trade.

“As the global landscape faces the continued threat of ASF, it is important to remain proactive and increase the preparedness of all stakeholders,” a CFIA spokesperson said. “Simulating the potential impact of ASF though exercises as part of Canada’s preparedness efforts are important to our response should ASF ever be detected in Canada.”

A number of future exercises are in the works, they added.

Communication was also a focus of the Feb. 12 exercise, Brockhoff said.

“The exercise proved very useful. The exercise certainly helps us learn. The exercise certainly helps us work through and train and plan and prepare, and that was successful.

“I think a separate topic though, that informs this a little bit, is this anxiety that if we don’t have the money in place on Day 1, that if pork producers don’t know that money is there and ready to support them, I think there’s a worry that all of the work, foreplanning and preparedness will crumble under the pressure of the unknown.”

Closing gaps

Much work has been done in recent years to keep ASF out of the country and limit the fallout if a case is found.

The ASF Pan-Canadian Framework for Action is the cumulation of those efforts. The plan covers four pillars: prevention and biosecurity; preparedness and planning; business continuity in the case of an infection; and co-ordinated risk communication.

There is a hog supply working group within the business continuity pillar, Brockhoff noted, but it’s hard to say why concrete financial promises have remained out of reach.

“We’ve had conversations for two and a half years in this space and there seems to be support there, but there’s really nothing in writing,” he said.

“There’s no sort of fixed or concrete plan that we can show pork producers to say, ‘this is absolutely what’s going to happen.’ We don’t have that concrete structure in place. We have assumptions, and that, of course, makes people nervous.”

Last summer, Canada’s ASF executive management board published a list of preparedness gaps as part of a progress report on the framework. Financial support was among those gaps.

Other flagged action items included a need to confirm that provinces and provincial pork organizations had emergency plans, that industry plans were harmonized with provincial and CFIA policies and that provincial plans addressed the specific needs of ASF.

The industry also needed more clarity on depopulation training and what to do with the carcasses, as well as more subject matter experts. There were kinks to work out about manure treatment on infected farms.

The board includes the Canadian Pork Council, CFIA, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, Canada Border Services Agency and Canadian Meat Council.

A long road

While there’s still work ahead, Brockhoff noted how far things have come since the first North American ASF forum in Ottawa in 2019. At that time, Canada’s only zoning agreements for ASF were with the U.S. and EU.

“Since then, the Government of Canada has gone out and put together a significant number of valuable bilateral trade arrangements in the face of ASF,” he said.

“They have gone further down the road with the United States in terms of incorporating the wild pig question in the face of ASF and they are actively negotiating with more key trading partners for more zoning arrangements.”

That could help the industry avoid widespread pig culls due to market disruption.

“That’s extremely powerful,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we won’t have to do some of a cull, but what it should mean is that we don’t have to completely dismantle the industry because of border closure.”

Realistically, no plan will keep the pork sector from feeling the hit if ASF is found. There will be some level of border closure and disruption.

“We’re not going to be able to implement our zoning arrangements tomorrow morning. It’s going to take time for government to contain and eradicate disease, to declare zones based on their knowledge of where disease is,” Brockhoff said.

That’s where immediate, short-term government support would kick in, industry argues.

That will be key to “ensure we can get through that bridge time,” Brockhoff said. “We don’t know what that’s going to be. Is that going to be two weeks? Is it going to be two months? Those are unknowns. They’re not going to be known until the event happens.”

The post The financial chink in Canada’s African swine fever armour appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

That’s a question asked of Dr. Julia Keenliside at the Manitoba Swine Seminar.

“Everybody’s got to work out what your procedures are, because that happens,” said Keenliside, an Edmonton-based swine veterinary expert.

Why it matters: If a person can get into the barn, so can a virus or bacteria.

It’s one of many biosecurity dangers that can arise at load out, and an under-appreciated source of disease risk.

“The load out should be seen as a high-risk event,” said Keenliside. “We forget about the load-out. We think about the front door.”

Some veterinarians think more disease enters barns through unwashed trucks and animals than operators realize. Keenliside suggested producers read Dr. Blaine Tully’s 2020 column in The Western Producer to develop the right thinking about truck and load out risks.

Although there isn’t sufficient research to be certain, there are reasons to believe disease-carrying dust, mud, manure and snow on the backs of trucks can be transferred into barns at the load out. Farms should take it seriously, Tully wrote.

Loading docks were also flagged as risk zones during Manitoba’s string of porcine epidemic diarrhea outbreaks beginning in 2017. Producers were urged to watch sanitation and biosecurity at such sites, have a defined line of separation between the “clean” areas inside the facility and the “dirty” areas anywhere else, and ensure truck drivers have fresh sets of disposable footwear when they step out of the cab.

Conversations about managing dust as a vector for PED have also made the rounds of industry groups and farm media.

“That’s what’s interesting about the ‘grey’ literature,” said Keenliside, referring to publications like farm magazines, conference proceedings, industry publications and other sources of non-peer-reviewed information. “We have some of the cutting-edge thinking.”

The Canada West Swine Health Intelligence Network has compiled a study and a tips sheet about load out biosecurity. Most barn systems don’t follow all veterinarian recommendations, so “we’ve got room for improvement.”

Beyond improving basic biosafety protocols, producers can look to more fundamental improvements, such as barn design. Keenliside said Minnesota adopted a two-door system that created a load-in chute and a load-out chute.

“That way, they never have to load pigs through a dirty chute; they never have to take deads out of the same chute they’re bringing in new stock, such as gilts,” said Keenliside.

In China, some farms are walled off from the outside world and pigs are brought in from the edge of the property.

“The trucker never even comes on the farm,” said Keenliside, while noting that Canada’s winter conditions make many ideas from warmer places harder to implement.

Beyond facility design, a key risk control is to stop people from going where they’re not supposed to go at the load out. Barn workers should not go beyond the barn edge and truckers should not come in from the truck.

A simple device, like a metal bar high enough to let the pigs under but high enough to block people, can effectively stop unsafe human traffic, seminar attendees heard.

The post Load out risky time for hog farm appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

On Jan. 24, the province announced that a hunter-submitted tissue sample from a female white-tailed deer near Winkler in south-central Manitoba had tested positive for CWD.

Chronic wasting disease is a fatal prion disease in the same family as BSE, impacting cervids like deer, elk and moose, and has become widespread in other Prairie provinces.

The closest positive case in the prior 2022-23 testing program was noted north of Deloraine in the southwest corner of the province. Most positive cases have been identified in areas along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. To date, 26 cases have been confirmed in the province since CWD was first detected in Manitoba in 2021.

Most of those cases have been mule deer. Last March, two CWD cases were found in male white-tailed deer, one in the RM of Grasslands and one northwest of Riding Mountain National Park. To date, four white-tailed deer cases have been found, the province said.

The Manitoba government expanded testing for the disease during the 2022-23 hunting season, asking hunters in many areas of the province to submit samples. That year, hunters submitted some 6,000 samples, up from an average of 1,000 in previous years. The sample swell caused testing backlogs, with waits up to 16 and 20 weeks.

In July 2023, the province announced $880,000 in funding and several regulatory changes to try to address the backlog. Hunters were given the option to submit tissue samples rather than the whole head and upper neck and were given seven days rather than two to turn in the sample.

The Wildlife Health Program also expanded its partnership to labs outside of Canada, as labs in Canada were previously overwhelmed with testing requests.

Testing requirements for bovine tuberculosis were also removed, as Manitoba has been considered free of that illness since 2016.

Backlogs continued to be reported as the 2023 hunting season drew to a close, however. In December, hunters were waiting two to four weeks between submitting samples and getting results, the province said at the time.

An infected deer can appear healthy for several years before developing changes in its body and behaviour, the Government of Saskatchewan’s website says.

Signs of infection include weight loss and poor co-ordination. Infected cervids are more prone to being killed by vehicles or hunters, the website says.

CWD is widespread in Saskatchewan. It’s thought that infected elk brought the disease into that province when they were imported from South Dakota in the 1980s. In the 2022/23 season, that province’s hunter surveillance program found 473 positive results out of 2,241 samples submitted, with most of those stemming from the western half of Saskatchewan.

CWD is not known to be a human health risk, but eating meat from an infected animal isn’t recommended.

The post First CWD case found in central Manitoba  appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.