Thursday, March 28, 2024

Another farm positive for M bovis

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Cattle on another van Leeuwen Dairy Group farm have tested positive for Mycoplasma bovis, Primary Industry Ministry response incident controller Stephen Bell says.
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Last week the ministry said it had enough pieces of the information jigsaw on the disease’s spread to make a decision this month of the eradication of the disease and destruction of animals on affected farms.

Bell said it did not have enough information.

New Zealand would be the first country in the world to eradicate this disease if the ministry succeeded.

The cattle to be destroyed would be sent for processing because there was no threat to human health.

The result on the farm, already under a restricted place notice under the Biosecurity Act, showed the response protocol was working, Bell said.

“We’ve said all along that we fully expected the possibility for further farms within this enterprise testing positive.

“The nature of this disease is that it spreads between animals that are in close, repeated and prolonged contact”, Bell said.

“The disease doesn't always present symptoms and often doesn’t show up through just one test.

“This is why we developed a testing protocol which tests herds up to three times at three to four week intervals.

“Testing like this, over two to three months gives us the confidence we need that we have definite results for each farm.

“This latest detection is evidence of that protocol working.

“It has meant there has been a long period of disruption and uncertainty for farms that are being tested but we have to be absolutely thorough in diagnosing positive and negative farms.

“It’s important for NZ that we take that time to get accurate results,” he says.

The ministry has tested 26,000 of 29,000 samples for the disease.

They were from infected properties, those where stock had moved to and neighbouring properties. All the farms identified had been from stock movement and no neighbouring farms had been infected.

"We’re not just relying on these tests though.

“We’ve been taking a multi-layer approach to testing to find out how widespread Mycoplasma bovis is.

“District-wide surveillance in Waimate/Waitaki has been part of this.

“Bulk and discard milks were collected from approximately 260 farms in the area and tested.

“All these results are now back and no further infection outside the Van Leeuwen Group has been found on farms in this area.”

There was also a nationwide testing programme.

Samples of mastitic milk were collected from regional labs across the country for testing.

About 2300 samples had been received and did not identify any other infected farms elsewhere in NZ.

"Taken together, these results are encouraging and suggest that our surveillance plan is working and this disease is not spreading in the local area around the infected farms and is not widespread across the country,” Bell said.

While sampling and testing continued MPI was preparing for what might happen next. 

“This involves preparing plans for the different possible scenarios.

“Eradication is one of the scenarios we are looking at but before we can make decisions we need to have enough evidence to be confident that the disease has not spread elsewhere”, he said.

“We cannot make long-term decisions that potentially have huge impacts on people’s lives without that knowledge.

“We need to be confident the disease is limited to the outbreak on the farms where we have detected it.

"As our picture grows and as more and more test results come back, the greater our confidence that the disease is being well contained on the known infected properties.

“We hope to have a clear picture by mid-October.”

If samples continued to test negative and if the evidence pointed to the infection being contained to the current properties and not having spread wider it would expect to have sufficient confidence to assess whether the disease could be eradicated.

“We know this is an enormously stressful time for the impacted farmers and also for the wider farming community.

“We are carrying out all our work with urgency to limit the impact on the farming community as much as possible. 

“We will be very open about the status of the response and whether eradication will be possible or not.

“In the meantime we continue to encourage all farmers and rural contractors to help protect their farms and businesses by following standard onfarm hygiene best practice."

Full information on hygiene measures and other resources are available on the MPI website.

 

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