Friday, June 7, 2019

Canada bungled export tests

Documents released under Access to Information reveal that Canada bungled disease testing for either pigs or semen or both exported to Columbia.

The University of Montreal Lab, which was on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency list of labs approved to conduct the tests, missed diseases subsequently identified at a government lab in Colombia.

There were frozen samples which the University of Montreal lab tested again and confirmed the presence of the viruses identified by the Colombians.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency yanked the University of Montreal accreditation and switched testing to the University of Guelph.

The documents are heavily censored so there is no information about the Canadian exporter or the Canadian origin of the pigs and/or semen.

But inter-government correspondence hints that the issue might have been Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus in an Ontario herd. But that is only a vague hint.