The current outbreak of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea (PED) virus in southeastern Manitoba has had a ripple effect on related industries like trucking. Rick Peters is the vice-president of Logistics and Industry Relations for Steve's Livestock Transport at Blumenort. He says PED makes their work more complicated.

"It certainly adds challenges. The virus has been around before so they (the challenges) are not new to us. It's just the outbreaks now are new. So what it's done for us, it's created heightened awareness. We are confident in our processes. We have a good process to clean up equipment, to wash, disinfect, bake and undercarriage wash it. We believe in those processes, our industry believes in them but we've taken some additional steps this spring to mitigate the risk."

Peters explains those additional measure include segregating their fleet of trailers that hauls culled animals into the U.S. Those trailers run only to the United States and back and don't go to individual farms in Canada. Furthermore, he says their dispatchers are on higher alert.

"Our dispatch program allows us to track all of our units and so we set up hot zones similar to what the province does. It's a five kilometre zone around an infected site. We tell them (the drivers) not to run through them and we can see if someone has inadvertently run through them. The other thing that it does is it allows us to track our units when they do go into the zone because they have to pick up a load. We can identify that unit, we know it ahead of time, and we can make sure that we track it and that we clean it up properly after it's been in the zone."

Peters notes he is surprised that PED spread to more barns last week because hot weather normally kills the virus. He says it's a bit discouraging to hear the virus is still around.