We must keep our foot on the pedal
OPINION: Last week marked a major step forward in our work to eradicate Mycoplasma bovis.
It is a milestone already reached once before, announced in August last year by the then Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor.
To be fair to O’Connor, he warned then that more cases may yet come to light – and a case then popped up on a Selwyn farm in September, and a second nearby in December.
However, those two farms have since been cleared, and confirmed cases are again back to zero, albeit this time without the Ministerial-level fanfare.
The last two public updates for the M. bovis Eradication Programme, one released on March 20 and the next on May 9, record no confirmed cases at least since late March. Figures for bulk milk tank testing and slaughterhouse testing also show many thousands of tests with no confirmed cases. The number of properties under Active Surveillance also dropped from 35 to 25 over that period.
The Eradication Programme has been contracted out from MPI to disease management agency OSPRI since November.
OSPRI’s general manager for Disease Control, Planning and Integration, Simon Andrew, agreed that the result is a milestone but emphasised the need for ongoing surveillance through the bulk milk and slaughterhouse testing.
“So, we try not to get ahead of ourselves, because we are six years into a ten-year journey and we are making really good progress against that.”
Andrew said the bulk milk testing covers every commercial dairy farm across the country.
“It does give us a high degree of confidence that the disease isn’t widespread. We do continue to pick up bulk tank milk detects and we’ll continue to see a bit of that particularly in cows drying off this month, in autumn, and autumn calving. And then we see it again in spring as well.
“Detects aren’t an indication or confirmation of infection. They simply indicate that antibodies are present, and we do follow-up testing on those.”
However, Andrew says there were no detects at all in April.
Meanwhile the figures show a slight increase in the number of farms under Notice of Direction, up from two to eight, but Andrew said there could be a number of reasons for that. A NOD might be used to direct a farmer to carry out testing of his animals. While most farmers were generally supportive, “in some cases, we do need to use legal instruments to direct animals to be tested.”
Andrew says the zero infection achievement is an opportunity to reflect on the programme’s impact, particularly on those farmers who had to go through.
