ANALYSIS: Why isn't Australia vaccinating against foot-and-mouth disease to protect our livestock?
The federal government has committed millions of dollars to a vaccine campaign to stamp out foot-and-mouth disease in Indonesia, leaving some Australian producers wondering why it isn't vaccinating local livestock against the highly contagious virus.Australia would lose export markets if livestock were pre-emptively vaccinated against FMD before it was detected
"If we were to vaccinate now, all of our trading partners would say, 'Well you're vaccinating for a disease, but you claim you don't have the disease.
Those rules stipulate it would take six months to restore Australia's FMD-free status if animals were vaccinated, not slaughtered, and surveillance was undertaken to demonstrate no evidence of infection in the nation's livestockAustralia holds a bank of vaccines in the United Kingdom, maintained by global pharmaceutical company Merial, according to Animal Health Australia.
But the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness has been working closely with a regional reference library in Thailand, where the disease is endemic, to ensure the vaccines in Australia's vaccine bank will be effective against the latest strains of FMD circulating in south-east Asia. Under the Australian Veterinary Emergency Plan , vaccination, pre-emptive culling and further movement controls are considered additional measures that can be taken to eradicate the virus.
Scientists from the CSIRO, DAFF and the University of Melbourne used the model to examine the effectiveness of vaccination to control a range of outbreak scenarios, andFor the research, the group assumed the virus was spreading undetected for 21 days in a range of different settings in each state, for example a hobby farm in the Sydney basin, interstate transport of infected cattle in Queensland, and anThe group found that in nearly all of the outbreak scenarios, the virus could be effectively...
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