Glacier FarmMedia – Ottawa must stop ignoring requests to create a vaccine bank that could save the country’s livestock sector from a devastating a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, say livestock leaders.
Producer organizations want Ottawa to spend $3.2 million per year to create a vaccine bank and strengthen its plans for managing a potential outbreak.
The response so far has been disappointing, said Melanie Wowk, chair of Alberta Beef Producers.
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“They are stalling and I don’t understand why,” said the Beauvallon-area rancher, who is also a veterinarian. “It is extremely frustrating. I don’t understand the animosity.
“We must be ready for this, from producers to veterinarians to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency as to exactly what’s going to happen if we determine foot-and-mouth has hit.”
Her organization has been lobbying for a vaccine bank in Canada for six years.
“Right now, we have a small vaccine bank that we share with other countries,” said Wowk.
The number of available doses is only a fraction of what would be needed in an outbreak, and there are many strains of foot-and-mouth disease that require different vaccines.
While there hasn’t been a case in Canada in six decades, the virus can be carried on shoes, clothing and food and could conceivably arrive from an infected country at any time.
The World Organization for Animal Health says the highly contagious viral disease is endemic in parts of Asia and most of Africa and the Middle East.
If it were to arrive here, other countries would close their borders to Canadian livestock and meat products, just as they did when BSE was discovered in 2003, said Wowk.
“No country is going to import anything from us – live or dead.”
There would be a huge immediate impact and also a long-lasting one, said Canadian Cattle Association president Reg Schellenberg, noting his organization has been asking Ottawa for a similar amount ($4 million annually) to avoid the kind of catastrophe brought by BSE.
“I remember the day when the (BSE) announcement came and the border was closed to all cattle and beef,” he said.
“At the time we were hoping it would be a very short delay, maybe weeks or months. But the actual impact probably hit our industry for the next 10 years. The impact was billions of dollars.”
Vaccinations key
The threat level ramped up this summer after Australian officials made an alarming discovery after increasing their detection efforts when Indonesia had a major foot-and-mouth outbreak. In July, they said they had found so-called ‘viral fragments’ of the disease in legally imported food products.
Although a fragment of the virus can’t spread the disease, the discovery was noted by livestock sectors around the world, including here.
Although not generally fatal, foot-and-mouth disease affects cattle, swine, sheep, goats and other cloven-hoofed ruminants.
“What it does is cause these blister type lesions on the mouth and the feet, and they are extremely painful,” said Wowk. “The animals can’t eat, and they can die typically from dehydration or just not eating. Those that survive tend to have quite chronic conditions. They just never fully recover. But it’s not transmittable to humans.”
The 1952 outbreak is believed to have been caused when a German man, who had worked on an infected farm in his homeland, brought a contaminated sausage to a Saskatchewan dairy and tossed it in a pig trough. Thousands of animals were put down, and the outbreak was only contained because of a very cold winter with lots of snow, said Wowk.
“But if you go back and Google some pictures of foot-and-mouth in Saskatchewan in the ‘50s, they just have these horrific pictures of cattle just being euthanized and then burned,” she said.
In addition to stringent border screening, the federal government says it has detailed plans in place should foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) show up here. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says those plans include quickly identifying all exposed premises, culling exposed and potentially exposed animals, and decontaminating affected farms, feedlots or other facilities to avoid further spread.
“In practice, the scope and details of the response and timelines would depend upon how far FMD has spread before it is detected, the density of livestock in the affected areas, effective biosecurity measures on the farms, and other factors,” the agency said in a statement.
Vaccination used to be considered a last resort, but its use during outbreaks in Japan and Korea has changed the thinking of experts.
It’s estimated that 2.5 million doses would be needed but Canada only has access to 330,000 doses from the North American foot-and-mouth vaccine bank, a joint initiative of the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
But even that can’t be counted on, said Wowk, who discussed the matter with some of her American counterparts during this summer’s Canadian Beef Industry Conference.
Those officials told her that Canada needs to “get its house in order” when it comes to preparations for an outbreak.
“They said regarding cross-border cattle crossings, ‘if you guys get foot-and-mouth and don’t have enough vaccine, we’re not going to be happy,’” said Wowk. “You can’t blame them. That was the message they came up to deliver.
“They have quite a bit larger vaccine bank than we do. A lot of people refer to it as the North American vaccine bank (but) they were very clear in saying it is not a North American vaccine bank. It’s a U.S. bank and ‘we are not sharing.’”
Canada is not unprepared but more must be done, said Dr. Leigh Rosengren, who recently joined the Canadian Cattle Association as its chief veterinary officer.
“We need a plan to actually administer the vaccine in the case of an outbreak,” she said, adding an extensive traceability effort would also be required. “It’s not like none of this is in place. There’s been a lot of work and a lot of plans created in the last 20 years.”
But while the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has been working with the association on the issue, “it’s not their role to lobby” the government to fund a Canadian vaccine bank and more robust planning, said Schellenberg.
“But they can certainly support and represent the industry’s concerns based on their knowledge of what the impact could be and how fast it can spread,” he said. “With transportation of cattle across Canada, it can be in one part of the country today and at the opposite side tomorrow.”
In its statement, the CFIA said that it, the Canadian Cattle Association and Animal Health Canada (an industry-government council) are members of a “working group evaluating the efficacy and feasibility of establishing a Canadian FMD vaccine bank in addition to the shared North American FMD vaccine bank.”
– This article was originally published at the Alberta Farmer Express.
