TB a ‘terrible thing’ for herd owner

“You will immediately get a 20% reduction in the value of your livestock, if you want to sell your farm it will be a problem, and your neighbours tend to ostracise you – they want to keep away,” Kelly told Dairy News.

Treasury types who have never been on farms will say it is only 0.1% of all herds so who cares? “My answer is if you are one of those 0.1% you care all right. It is easy for policy people to say you only get 40 herds out of 12,000 a year, and that’s true, but if you are one of those 40 herds it is devastating.”

Kelly told the Pukekohe TB strategy meeting that he started life as a vet and one of his first jobs in 1970 was to TB test dairy herds in Bay of Plenty.  About 80% of cattle tested positive and some had clinical TB. Many of the rural kids had bovine TB – they had picked it up from drinking infected milk from the vat before it was pasteurised or from infected pigs that had eaten whey when butter was made.

“It was a terrible disease in those days and we have made enormous strides.” 

TB has been in New Zealand herds for about 100 years, and started to be actively managed in the 1950s, but around the 1980s we started to withdraw, Kelly says. We thought we had it licked because we did not understand the devastating effect of possums. At its peak in 1994 there were 1700 herds affected annually.

Farmers have spent $1.2 billion in eradication measures and “you don’t want to waste that money. It has been a great success story for NZ.”

Of other countries trying to manage TB, Australia only need eradicate it in livestock because its possums don’t get TB. The UK is hopeless because its possum equivalent is the badger and badgers are riddled with TB. “They just can’t get rid of it.”

“So we are the only country able to get rid of it from the vectors – possums, ferrets, etc – and from the livestock. That’s why the last five years has been proof of concept.

“We will be the only country to eradicate it through vectors as well. Australia will eradicate but all they need to do is get rid of it in their livestock.”

Kelly says it is unlikely there will be a lot of difference in trade reputation between eradication and our current situation because our main target markets have TB. But from a clean, green point of view there is some advantage. 

“But the main advantage is to get rid of TB in New Zealand and never have to spend money on it again.”