Friday, March 29, 2024

Bovis eradication still realistic

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Eradicating Mycoplasma bovis is proving realistic, M Bovis Programme communications manager Joe Stockman says. But it is highly unlikely how it got here will ever be known.
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Addressing a large gathering of farmers, rural professionals and community leaders in Oamaru on Wednesday Stockman said there’s confidence in a successful eradication.

M bovis is not right across New Zealand, making eradication feasible.

“The current spread is very limited to the movement of infected animals.

“We are confident this disease is not moving out of the known network by movement of animals or milk.

“We know conclusively it’s not all over the country and all the evidence we have got suggests it’s a single-source strain,” Stockman said.

“We will probably never find the smoking gun on how M bovis made it to NZ.”

But when challenged by farmers Stockman said that is not a stumbling block to eradication.

“The key thing is we do not need to know the pathway to achieve eradication.”

Questioned for assurance it will never happen again Stockman said it could but it’s a very low risk.

“Yes, we have systems in place locking down all known risk, yes it’s come in once but to lock down total risk we would lose a lot of money.”

The rest of the world has the disease so there’s no check list.

“But you can be assured the Ministry for Primary Industries is doing all it can to keep out all things that can be of risk.”

Even with a successful eradication M bovis testing will become the norm.

“We will have M bovis testing forever in NZ now as that will allow us to lock down any re-entry very quickly.”

So why eradication?

With an estimated $1.3 billion of lost productivity in the first 10 years it was deemed, at a cost of $870 million, eradication was probably worthwhile, Stockman said.

“If we allow M bovis to stay here we would be seriously challenging our farm systems.”

He acknowledged compensation has not been good to date but has improved in recent months.

“We are getting money into people’s pockets much more quickly with claims today generally taking no more than 30 days.”

M bovis was confirmed in NZ in July 2017.

“Now it’s how we will prove we have achieved eradication,” Stockman said.

Work is under way to determine how much extra spread occurred because of the delay that prompted the tracing surge in April last year.

“We are working on data on that now.

“We have learned we need to push the decision-making down into the regions to get decisions made much quicker, with more vets, more technical support and more people in regions to achieve this.”

Bulk milk testing has proved to be a valuable tool with not much infection being found now – about nine farms a month of which just 7% convert to a notice of direction (NoD).

The year ahead will continue to be intense.

“We will be at high operational pace for at least another year.

“There are more infected farms to find, hopefully not too many, but they are out there and we will find them,” Stockman said.

One of the key challenges is still Nait recording.

“Farmers are not actually completing the process and there are a lot of unhappy farmers finding a $2000 fine in their mailbox.”

That riled up farmers who were quick to point out that Nait still has flaws.

“If we are crossing the ts and dotting the is then Nait has to do the same – this is a two-way street,” South Canterbury beef farmer Bill Wright said. 

“Nait is failing us and MPI is failing us but I’m not blaming MPI or blaming Nait – just pointing out that we self-reported three-months before we were contacted through tracing.

“We knew we had infected animals and it was 12 months from start to finish. That’s still happening and it’s very frustrating,” Wright said.

Stockman agreed.

“That’s not good enough. Self-reporting, we should have been there that week. I apologise for that. 

“Nait has improved but it needs to improve more,” Stockman said.

It appeared there’s misunderstanding.

The tags when bought are registered to a property but farmers must then register each tag as it’s allocated to an animal.

On the education side of the Nait programme Ospri representative Nikki Penno said there’s still a lot of work going on to make Nait work better with the big issue being tagging and registering.

“Every animal needs to be tagged within six months of birth. You can’t leave them untagged until you load them on the truck.

“The tags when purchased are assigned to your property but not registered to an animal. You must register each tag you put on an animal,” Penno said.

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