Plan now for foot and mouth-vet

It was the one major take-home message he wanted to give from a briefing session on LIC’s preparedness to respond to an outbreak of an exotic animal disease (like FMD).

“Everybody that trades or has anything that can pass on the virus, that is cattle, or germplasm or any other animals that are susceptible to FMD, must have a plan,” he says.

“One of the hardest things to do in an emergency is to think of what to do immediately. With an FMD outbreak in New Zealand, the most important part is you do the right thing to try and stop it or limit the spread.”

In 2004 LIC produced a 40-page plan – in 2005 there was an FMD scare on Waiheke Island and they used the document to dictate what LIC would do to protect its germplasm and animals.

In the event of an outbreak LIC first must take instruction from the Ministry for Primary Industries, says Cottier. “They will dictate everything. They will issue a control area which gives them the legal right to stop people moving cattle, germplasm, or anything else that might harbour FMD.

“We don’t know how big the control area would be – if it was up north it might be north of Auckland, if it was in central North Island it might be right through the North Island and if it’s near Wellington, they might say the whole of New Zealand. 

“There’s a national standstill period for however long it takes to delineate the extent of the outbreak. That could be anywhere from a week to a month.

“Everything stops moving and there’s a period of investigation to delineate the boundaries of the outbreak and then restrictions will be put in place.” 

The first requirement is to follow what the ministry says. But secondly, “we have to look after ourselves, protect our livestock, protect LIC semen stocks and maintain enough stocks of quarantine semen to maintain our national dairy herd if necessary”. 

Those things that can harbour FMD on the LIC premises at Ruakura include livestock – they usually have about 1000 stock on site at any one time – bovine semen stocks, milk samples for testing, DNA tissue samples and animal health team samples received from vets. FMD can last in a frozen sample indefinitely. It is very contagious and can last outside the host animal for up to a couple of weeks. 

What LIC would do immediately on the first day is straightforward and simple: lock all farm gates, stop all semen collections, cease all stock movements and farm visits. All those procedures are aimed at protecting its bulls.

“On our farms, all our animals are behind double fences and all our fences are at least 2m apart. You never get nose-to-nose contact but because FMD can remain outside the host for quite a long time, faeces on boots or tyres can bring it in.”

Any farm staff who have contact with animals outside LIC are sent home. “During the Waiheke scare, that is what happened – guys went home for three days. The other staff stayed and they are the only ones that go on farm.” 

The disease can be brought on to a site on “two legs or four”. But with a lock-down management plan in place, the only way the virus could enter would be through ‘pluming’, which is far less likely.  This is when you get large amounts of virus at any one spot, usually only in pig farms. “If there are a lot of pigs all infected they produce a huge amount of virus and it can plume like a cloud and go by air movement.”

Cottier says with an FMD outbreak, all services will stop during the standstill period which would probably be two weeks. “Nothing will happen including mating even if it’s in spring. All techs have got to home and lock up their tanks of semen, and equipment and vehicles.” They will need to wash clothes and disinfect equipment before they attend to any of their own animals. 

“All herd testing will stop, all equipment on farm stays there, all vehicles are secured and disinfection procedures follow. Milk samples will be disposed of but chemically disinfected first and there are further procedures for that.”

To make sure semen is safe, all semen is quarantined for 60 days as a standard practice. 

This is based on an assumption the disease could have been present in New Zealand for up to 30 days before detection. In reality it is likely to be detected a lot sooner than that.