By Dr Clive Dalton
Livestock Officers
Up to the 1980s, the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) had an army of
Livestock Officers working from every town office testing cattle on programmes to eradicate Tb and
Brucellosis. They were our watchdogs for anything abnormal that they saw on
farms, which could have been the first signs of exotic diseases like foot and
mouth.
MAF also had full-time veterinarians in the
district offices to supervise the Livestock Officers’ work, and backed by our MAF
admin staff, we held regular on-farm exercises to respond to an exotic disease
incident.
We practised total lockdown of animals,
people, pets and vehicles – all with police backing. We were never popular,
which I knew well being involved with the media liaison. After an exercise we had detailed
debriefings by all involved, which were scary, but at least we learned what we could
be in for.
Change to SOE
But all this went down the bureaucratic
offal hole with the spawning of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s, which
had to make a profit for government shareholders – the public.
Private veterinarians were given a greater
role in disease surveillance for government, and a 0800 number was provided if
you saw any slobbering or lame animals.
The trouble with this was that vets didn’t have the same coverage or
right to walk on to farms which the MAF livestock officers had, as acting like
a policeman wasn’t good for their future client relations or business.
So self-regulation claimed the day, and
recent examples of its success don’t bear listing. The scary feature of recent events
has been the delay seen in action, and poor communication between the major bureaucracies.
Delays of weeks and even months between tests and actions have been the norm.
Virus spread on the wind
With a virus like Foot and Mouth (FMD) spreading
blowing on the wind, delay and a good westerly wind could see all farm animals infected
between Raglan and Te Aroha (or even further afield) in a few days. Birds and vermin would add their
unwelcome and uncontrollable contribution to this spread, as animal carcases
would be a great food source for them.
FMD is now an increasing possibility with increased
tourism (and the risk of people smuggling ethnic food), larger ships carrying
more containers and more pressure at ports, more yachts arriving at exotic bays
and islands, and Palm Kernal Expeller (PKE) with freeloaders coming from Asia
where FMD is endemic.
Pigs
And then there are pigs. Who would know where all the backyard and
wild pigs are in New Zealand? Sadly
Ministry of Primary Industry (MPI) would never be able to find out, and few of
these pigs would ever see a veterinarian or a meat inspector, allowing pigs and
their meat ending up anywhere before an exotic disease was officially diagnosed
and restrictions brought in.
And then there are pigs. Who would know where all the backyard and
wild pigs are in New Zealand? Sadly
Ministry of Primary Industry (MPI) would never be able to find out, and few of
these pigs would ever see a veterinarian or a meat inspector, allowing pigs and
their meat ending up anywhere before an exotic disease was officially diagnosed
and restrictions brought in. What’s more, who is ensuring that all garbage including meat is cooked to the required 100°C for at least an hour according to the law? Registered commercial pig farmers are no problem, as they don’t tend to feed garbage, it’s the backyard piggeries that are the problem.
MAF Livestock Officers always had good
local contacts to locate non-registered pig keepers, and pub talk after a day’s
TB testing (with the MAF car parked out of sight) was an invaluable tool to
know what was going on in the pig world.
Pigs fed uncooked garbage are a guaranteed
source of FMD as they are the great incubators and spreaders of the virus,
unlike cattle, sheep and deer.
FMD and trade
When (and not if) we get FMD, it’s highly
likely to be an Asian strain and our European customers (where they vaccinate
as FMD is endemic) wouldn’t want this risk. So they’ll use this as a great
opportunity to delay restarting trade, simply by refusing to accept our renewed
disease free status. They’ll just keep
on demanding more time and more documentation – easily for years. It could end up like apples to
Australia – taking decades.
The size of a clean up, even if we use
vaccination and lose New Zealand’s disease free status, would be massive. Finding people, coal, railway sleepers
and machinery to burn and bury just Waikato’s one million dairy cows would be
frightening. Imagine having an outbreak which could spread through the whole of
the North Island? The
environmental impact on ground water of having all these buried carcasses
doesn’t bear thinking about.
In the last UK outbreak there were 60 new outbreaks
each day, and by the time the teams could get cows burned or buried, they’d
blown up to twice their size to make the job even harder. This handling can further spread the virus,
as can veterinarians who have to stand down after a few days work. Dead stock have to be moved in totally
sealed trucks – so hopefully MPI have a fleet of those parked somewhere.
Restocking farms
Assuming that a clean up would eventually come
to an end, at a cost to the economy that nobody dare predict, the really big
concern is where would be get enough female genetics to restock our farms?
New Zealand's farmer cooperative Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) is well stocked with quarantined bull
semen, but they don’t have a contingency plan as far as I can see to provide
females to put semen into. Neither
is there a stockpile of frozen ovaries and embryos for any of our top farm livestock. A few wise beef and sheep stud breeders
have made small provisions of semen and ovaries from their top animals, but
they could never provide enough for a national crisis.
It’s very hard to find people to discuss
this question with, assuming presumably that the worst will never happen. One minute organisations involved with
our farm livestock are skiting about having the best genetics in the world, and
then apparently assume that when millions of them go up in smoke or into large
holes, females with the same genetic merit will mysteriously appear out of thin
air to be mated and carry on where we left off!
National gene back needed
I’m not holding my breath for any farming
organisation volunteering to start a National Gene Bank to save our farm
livestock, the nation’s farmers and the economy, as CEOs will rightly argue
that it’s not their organisations’ core business.
The need cries out for government
leadership and investment. But who
would listen? An old MAF mate and
I have chewed plenty of ears over the last 40 years and failed. We could make a good start with the
$40million of government money promised for the next America’s cup attempt!
It’s only when you’ve lived through a FMD
outbreak and remember the loss of valuable animals, the resulting human devastation
and suicides, the stink of burning flesh, enormous holes on places like disused
airfields, roads clogged by rubber neckers and the silence in the countryside, that
you realise how ill prepared we are to face a FMD nightmare.
