Bio exclusion is a portion of biosecurity and is important to understanding how viruses spread among animals. And because keeping a disease out of a herd is easier than treating after the fact, Dr. Jordan Gebhart at Kansas State University is focusing his research on the safety of the feed industry.
“Bio exclusion is everything we put in place and the procedures we put in place to avoid that pathogen," Gebhart told KMA Land. "In this case, a virus, from coming into contact with that susceptible population. So, in terms of feed biosecurity, if we have a feed mill and these feed trucks and manufacturing equipment, the trucks are going from farm to farm, the concept of bio exclusion is avoiding bringing pathogens into this mill to start with. Because once we know that it gets into a mill, in many cases, it becomes widely distributed and we really don’t have great methods to remove that contamination and remove that virus from the feed mills.”
In the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak like African Swine Fever, Gebhart says communication is a key to battling it.
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