No outbreak, says MPI

“It’s an increase but it’s within what we were expecting we would find. We had always expected that this spring was when we would pick up a few more,” he told Dairy News.

As of the November 13 update, seven farms nationally were listed as confirmed active properties, after the figure dropped to as little as one in August and September.All seven are in Canterbury and six are in the Mid-Canterbury district.

The two most recent detections were a Mid-Canterbury property directly linked by animal movements to an infected property detected from the Programme’s August bulk tank milk screening, and one in the Selwyn district, confirmed following a detect result from the September bulk tank milk screening.

MPI says it is “not an outbreak” but shows the surveillance programme is working as it should.

“Nor is it widespread — no additional farms in the Mid Canterbury/Ashburton district other than those three dairies originally detected in August were found in September or October bulk tank milk screening, giving confidence this is an isolated cluster connected by animal movements.”

Anderson said spring is when the disease is most easily detectable as cows are under stress from recent calving, and 2018 heifers which may not have been picked up in the early days of the eradication programme are milking now for the first time.

At least one of the current cases is understood to be on a farm which had stock culled just last year.

Anderson acknowledged rumours that infected animals may have been missed but there was no evidence to support that.

“We are still deep in the process of going through the connections, movements, linkages, the genomic analysis, etc, but at the moment there isn’t any evidence to support that something was missed last year.”

Meanwhile, the beef herd survey, which aims to discover whether Mycoplasma bovis has spread into the country’s beef industry, has now tested 86,600 animals from over 4000 farms. The survey has uncovered no confirmed infection to date.