Saturday, March 30, 2024

Search for M bovis goes national

Avatar photo
The search for Mycoplasma bovis will go nationwide this week in an effort to determine if the cattle disease is more widespread than South Canterbury.
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Notified for the first time in New Zealand last month on a South Canterbury farm, the infectious disease outbreak was the subject of a national incursion response.

Farmers at a Primary Industries Ministry community meeting in Waimate on Thursday were told bulk milk testing of 200 tankers would start this week.

While Fonterra was leading the charge for the bulk milk testing, at least one other milk company, not identified, would be part of the exercise.

Response incident controller Eve Pleydell said it was important to find out if the disease was already occurring in other parts of the country.

So MPI was working with regional veterinary laboratories, Massey University and animal industry bodies to collect and analyse samples.

They included milk from cows with mastitis, discarded milk and routine bulk milk samples.

Pleydell said there had been no more confirmed positive test results and the situation remained at the two infected farms owned by the van Leeuwen dairy group at Morven.

So far the first test results from seven other of the 16 van Leeuwen farms were negative.

“This is good news but due to the difficulties of diagnosing this disease, two further rounds of testing will be required on these farms before they can be declared free of the disease,” Pleydell said.

The first test results for 11 of the 62 neighbouring farms were also negative.

So far 33,000 samples had been taken from farms.

“We expect testing to take two to three months,” Pleydell said.

Nearly 200 farmers attended the Waimate meeting where they heard from eight MPI officials and a British veterinarian brought in to help.

“We really did get some answers this time and that has certainly helped lower farmer anxiety levels,” South Canterbury Federated Farmers dairy vice-chairman John Gregan said.

“There has been a lot of farmers feeling quite scared, just because of so much unknown but with the good line-up of speakers and more information available we did come away feeling a lot happier.”

 

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading