MPI incident controller Stephen Bell said the find confirmed that MPI protocols were working.
"We've said all along that we fully expected the possibility of further farms within this enterprise testing positive. The nature of this disease is that it spreads between animals in close, repeated and prolonged contact.”
The property had already been under movement control through a restricted place notice since the start of the response. MPI said the disease does not always show up through a single test and the find shows why repeated testing is required for two-three months to give definite results for each farm.
Mycoplasma bovis, common overseas, was first detected in New Zealand in mid-July on one of the VLDG’s 16 Waitaki district properties. It has now been confirmed on five VLDG farms, another farm in the district which had received animals from a VLDG farm and a lifestyle block near Rangiora which had received animals from that farm – all stock movements having occurred before the disease was identified.
All detections to date were linked to the original infected properties via animal movements and have been caused by close animal contact. Despite intensive testing, no adjacent properties have as yet been identified as infected.
The find comes as the testing regime approaches the three-quarter mark. MPI’s most recent update records 28,985 tests completed of an expected 39,000. "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,” said Bell.
"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.”
A nationwide testing of mastitic milk samples from regional labs is also underway. About 2300 samples have been tested and results have not identified 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," said Bell.
