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FMD: Disease control and vaccination

Biosecurity

As ever, it is important that high standards of biosecurity are maintained. Biosecurity is the prevention of disease-causing agents entering or leaving a livestock premises. It involves a number of measures designed to prevent disease being spread from one premises to another.

Vaccination

Defra decided not to vaccinate during the 2007 outbreak as the interim epidemiological report concluded that the risk of the spread of infection out of the Restricted Zone was very low.

Emergency vaccination was kept under review in case a veterinary risk assessment showed that measures additional to the basic slaughter policy were required to control the disease. Our legislation places vaccination at the forefront of disease control policies and puts in place control measures to enable vaccination to take place.

Under our contingency plan, we are committed to being logistically ready to vaccinate within 5 days of confirmation of an FMD outbreak. We ordered 300,000 doses of vaccine, once we knew the relevant strain, which were made and were fully ready for use.

The vaccine was produced at the Merial production facility in Pirbright which is the only facility licensed to produce FMD vaccines in the UK. We did not do this without careful consideration and assessment of the risks. This production was cleared by the Health and Safety Executive and the Veterinary Medicines Directorate as safe as it did not involve the live virus and had no bearing on the investigations at the Pirbright site.

Vaccination to live, which would have been our preferred option, would have meant that it would have taken 6 months (rather than 3 months for a vaccinate to kill or slaughter only policy) to gain FMD-free status for the purposes of international trade. The 6 months would have run from the last confirmed case or the last vaccination, whichever was the later, and would have required serological testing of a proportion of vaccinated animals to demonstrate that they had not been infected.

Under European law, prior to the UK regaining FMD-free status, products from vaccinated animals would have had to have been cooked to destroy any virus - as an animal, not human, health protection measure. Therefore, with some limited exemptions for some categories of beef and sheepmeat, such products could not have been sold as fresh meat. These treatments are broadly the same as those required for animal products from an FMD Restricted Zone, if animals there were licensed to go to slaughter.

See also

 

Page last modified: 1 November, 2008