Animal Disease
Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Greg Ibach explains the role of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine bank would play in an overall preparedness approach against this livestock disease.The 2018 farm bill really provided us funding for a three legged stool approach to animal disease preparedness. One of them was a vaccine bank having an effective laboratory network in place. And the third leg on that stool was to do preparatory stuff, emergency planning and exercises that would help the industry be prepared and know what was going to happen in the event of an animal disease outbreak. USDA since 1929 has had overlapping safeguards in place, a 90 year history of keeping foot and mouth disease out of United States has shown that that has been effective. But with African swine fever raging around the world and our effectiveness of keeping that out of the US, it creates more concern about those foreign animal diseases as we see more and more trade and more and more travel between countries.