Quick, Safe and Effective Vaccine Delivery Offered

Needless injectors use a high velocity blast of compressed air or carbon dioxide rather than conventional needles to administer vaccines and medications.

Under the federal-provincial Growing Forward Program the Manitoba government is offering pork producers up to two thousand dollars to offset some of the cost of purchasing a needless injector.

Dr Phil Willson, an adjunct professor with the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan, recalls research he conducted three to five years ago showed skilled personnel using these needle-free injectors can administer vaccines quickly, effectively and safely.

The advantages of getting rid of needles are several.

Of course they're a sharps biohazard and this requires special disposal so veterinarians for example have special containers that these are collected in and then they have to be disposed of in a proper fashion.

To do that on the farm or the production unit is an extra step that you have to be involved in.

Second of course needles are safety risk for accidental injection of staff or other people that are working with the pigs.

And needles in the herd itself can be a way of spreading infectious diseases.

There have been examples shown of spreading PRRS and strep suis so they can spread disease and then we hope this doesn't happen again in the future but there have been of course cases of broken needles ending up in the meat product occasionally.

Dr Willson notes, in his experience, properly trained personnel can use these devices with little disturbance so they appear to be easier on the pigs and they provided a very good response to the vaccines, perhaps even better than conventional administration, as long as the equipment was used properly.