The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
THE Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) technical bulletin of April 2016 produced by Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) brought in some new perspective into the understanding of the disease. The bulletin made some revelations based on current scientific research dispelling what most professionals and farmers have always believed as a gospel truth about FMD.
The import of the contents of the bulletin can be summarised into three aspects:
(1) that persistently infected buffalos transmit the disease to susceptible cattle
(2) the mechanism or trigger for transmission is not yet known
(3) there is no evidence of transmission of FMD from carrier cattle to uninfected cattle. My interest and that of many farmers is on the last one and its implications thereof. I would like to quote the technical bulletin on this.
“Suspicion that cattle carriers have been responsible for maintaining and spreading FMD have been reported periodically from many parts of the world, including Zimbabwe (Thomson, 1996). However, all the experiments conducted to prove that this actually occurs, involving persistently infected cattle being kept in intimate contact with susceptible cattle for prolonged periods, have been unsuccessful (Tenzin et al, 2008; Parthiban et al, 2015). This has included efforts to ‘‘stress’’ the persistently infected cattle, either by physical or medical (corticosteroid administration) means.
This issue has a major practical implication in that it calls into question the logic of the duration of quarantine periods, that can be as long as 18 months, that are imposed on locations in Zimbabwe and other southern African countries where outbreaks of FMD in cattle have occurred. Prolonged quarantine has had, and continues to have, serious economic repercussions for cattle producers in Zimbabwe as well as other countries of the southern African region”.
Now this has far reaching implications to both farmers and livestock professionals especially from the veterinary side.
One farmer described the effect of this revelation to the veterinary officers as frustrating as it questions the foundation of all your beliefs which you have religiously and proudly passed to farmers.
He said it’s like a person who is suddenly told the earth is round after living most of his life believing it was flat.
The belief that carrier cattle can transmit the infection to uninfected cattle has always formed the axis of the movement restrictions which has tormented livestock farmers for a long time. We have seen quarantines being imposed on feedlot animals with devastating repercussions as the farmer will not be allowed to take the animals of the feedlot and he has to feed them until the ban is lifted which could be more than four months later.
While this information is important in informing new directions and thinking about FMD, the farmer cannot help but feel cheated that all these years he has been bearing the brunt and counting losses caused by livestock movement restrictions yet there seems to be no scientific evidence to support transmission of the disease among cattle themselves.
FMD is a disease which has serious economic implications on livestock farmers especially in Matabeleland region where cattle rearing is a major economic driver.
It is so economically painful and sensitive to the extent that accusations of Government’s lukewarm response and deliberate marginalisation of the region have been thrown around as farmers vent their frustrations about the embargo imposed by the disease.
It is in that regard that this pen moves for a serious rethought on FMD combating strategies which are not only informed by the cost of the vaccinations but primarily informed by the emergence of new knowledge on the disease.
We may need to review the justifications of movement restrictions and quarantines with an intention to ease the pain on farmers based on new understandings.
New knowledge has to be sought about FMD so that the current positions can be reviewed if necessary.
Our research departments need to come in and provide a new body of knowledge on FMD such that our interventions cannot remain anchored on obsolete information. It cannot remain business as usual at the expense of farmers, especially when some of the beliefs are beginning to crack under modern scientific scrutiny. We as a country start asking ourselves hard questions, for example do we really need to be tied down to FMD controls which are meant to satisfy export requirements when we are not exporting and perhaps we have no intention to export?
