08/24/07 Foot & Mouth Disease Prompts Action

Foot & Mouth Disease Prompts Action. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Cattle producers in the United Kingdom have recently been plagued by a second outbreak of foot and mouth disease and that outbreak is causing producers in the U.S. to sit up and take notice. Jamie Jonker is the Director of Regulatory Affairs with the National Milk Producers Federation. JONKER: We've had a good string here in the U.S. in that we haven't had an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease since 1929, looking at almost 80 years but given the global realities of travel of people, travel of products there is a concern that a foot & mouth disease outbreak could occur in the U.S. There are also come concerns that there could be an intentional introduction of foot and mouth disease in the U.S. Of course that falls under the heading of National Security but Jonker says the UK outbreak is the warning flag for producers to implement a national animal I.D. system. JONKER: With the ability to trace animal movements within 48 hours is an important part of our industries insurance policy against animal disease outbreaks such as foot and mouth disease. And we've been working with 5 other partners in the dairy industry to help us get information out to our dairy producers about the need for being part of the national animal identification system. When the UK's first outbreak happened about 5 years ago, the beef industry lost a lot of consumer confidence. The most recent outbreak was more controlled. JONKER: We've learned a couple of things from that outbreak. With their ability to track animal movements they were able to quickly quarantine farms where the animals were identified and suspect farms where they had to do more investigations to determine whether the animals actually had foot and mouth disease and in doing so they were able to look at slaughtering only a couple hundred animals versus hundreds of thousands of animals. At present Jonker says there has been a fairly warm reception to cooperating in the identification system but there are some hold outs. JONKER: Over the past 2 years I think we've had a pretty good response  probably somewhere around half of the commercial dairy farms in the U.S. are already registered within the National Animal Identification system. That leaves us roughly 30 to 35-thousand dairy farms and diary calf and heifer growers that are currently not in the system and that is where we are focusing our current efforts on. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.