Farm animal veterinarians should have responsibility for verifying the health status of new breeding stock before those animals are allowed onto their client’s farms. Such strict controls on bought-in stock may be the only way to prevent the further spread of endemic disease in the national herd, according to food industry consultant, Cedric Porter.
Speaking at a National Office of Animal Health food chain conference in London on 25th February, Mr Porter, former editor of Farm Business magazine and founder of the consultancy Supply Intelligence Ltd, argued that farmers must be discouraged from buying stock “blind” – with no reliable information on the health status and the consequent disease risks.
“One would not buy a car without it having an MOT and without knowing something about its service history. Nor should a farmer consider buying expensive breeding stock without some knowledge of their health history, vaccination status, and so on.”
Making the wrong choice when deciding to purchase new breeding stock can have devastating consequences for any livestock farmer, he reminded colleagues at the meeting, which was organised to assess the role of vaccination in safeguarding animal health.
In one recent case in which a farmer introduced a bull carrying infectious bovine rhinotracheitis virus into his elite breeding herd, the eventual costs were estimated at more than £100,000, he said.
Mr Porter is working with staff at the University of Oxford in a project to assess the practicalities and costs of introducing a system of pre-purchase inspection and verification of an animal’s health status by veterinary practitioners.
This would help cattle and sheep producers in achieving the same high biosecurity standards that have long been the norm in the pig and poultry sectors, he said.
Prospects for the British livestock industry are better now than they have been for many years, he claimed. Although the numbers of holdings may have declined over the past decade the survivors are “leaner, meaner and more professional in outlook” than previous generations.
So he was confident that the industry will continue to take advantage of a favourable exchange rate which allowed exports of meat and dairy products to increase by 30% in the first 10 months of 2008.
However, this resurgence in the industry would be vulnerable to any failure to maintain the current health status and markets could disappear again as they did during the BSE and foot-and-mouth crises. Mr Porter warned farmers it was largely their own responsibility to protect against the sort of epidemic diseases that have caused 11 major epidemics of notifiable diseases around the world in the first six weeks of 2009 alone.
Less taxpayers’ money
In a global recession, neither government nor the general public will support the use of taxpayers’ money in livestock diseases control to the extent that they have done in the past, he said. But the Government does have an essential role in co-ordinating efforts to stop the spread of new disease agents such as bluetongue, said Professor Peter Mertens, head of the arbovirus research group at the Institute of Animal Health Pirbright laboratory.
He said the vaccination campaign in England and Wales would not have succeeded without DEFRA’s decision to guarantee an order for 22.5 million doses of the vaccine against bluetongue serotype 8.
“This should be seen as a major success for veterinary medicine and one in which DEFRA deserves considerable credit, particularly when we look at the scale of disease problems that were faced last year by neighbouring European countries.”
Government support had also enabled Britain to maintain a research capability at Pirbright for many years before bluetongue became a serious threat. “Without that, there would have been no scientific base to do any of the diagnostic work needed to identify the different bluetongue strains and which was a vital part of the successful campaign against serotype 8 in 2008.
“But that success has created a further problem in that we must now persuade farmers to vaccinate again this year against the backdrop of a threat that didn’t happen, and that represents a real challenge for us,” Professor Mertens warned.
Encouragement from their veterinary advisers will be essential in persuading farmer clients that bluetongue remains a serious threat that can only be dealt with by vaccination, noted Alasdair King, veterinary manager with Intervet/Schering-Plough, one of the three companies supplying vaccines against the virus serotype 8.
Client meetings helped get across the message of the potential damage to the UK livestock industry that could be caused by this virus and they would be equally important in providing the vaccination coverage needed to suppress the virus in 2009.
It may take at least two years of disease-free summers before we can be sure that serotype 8 is no longer circulating in the UK, Professor Mertens explained during questions. And even if that particular virus can be beaten back, the battle against bluetongue is by no means over. Europe has experienced incursions by at least one of the 25 different virus serotypes in each year for the past decade.
No one can predict which serotype might reach these islands in the future but serotypes 1, 6 and 11 were already present on our doorstep and appear to pose the greatest threats, he said
