Jeremy's Blog 4th October 2024: Biosecurity - The Coming Expectations

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 3rd October 2024

The steady westward expansion of the Bluetongue Restricted Zone draws attention to the persistent bubbling threats of disease, its consequences and the measures that may be taken to prevent and control it. We have to expect more on biosecurity with issues that may become relevant to value for farms, for animals and for businesses.

The separation given by the English Channel is a defence but not an absolute one. By contrast to a land border, active movements are largely limited to points of entry. Wild animals cannot simply roam across borders in the way seen on the continent. It is then harder for a new disease or pest to establish a critical mass here as a domestic reservoir for future infection. However, advancing climate change makes it easier for new threats to survive a winter and become established, as is the fear with the Bluetongue midge. One example is the Dartmoor vet reporting a once exotic worm now to be endemic on the Moor.

Both Avian Influenza and Bluetongue show that seas can be crossed by migrating birds and the wind. The winds that brought Bluetongue to Norfolk and Holderness from the Low Countries also bring nitrogen deposits as it seems they do from Britanny to the south west and from Ireland to Wales. The single 1981 case of Foot and Mouth on the Isle of Wight was considered to have blown in from France with movement restrictions applied immediately not just to the Isle but also parts of Hampshire and Dorset.

Bluetongue is a disease for which there is little control beyond isolation and care, a biosecurity view seeming to explain the scale of this year’s Restricted Zones as the current vaccine for this serotype BTV-3 only manages symptoms.

While those are the current headlines, there is growing concern about the westward advance of African Swine Fever (ASF) in pigs, a disease that wreaked havoc in China. In Italy, some 8,000 square miles of Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy are restricted with the army looking for wild boar in the woods. France is looking at a border barrier for wild movements from Germany. The UK has now imposed limited controls on personal imports of pigmeat and, for Peste de Petits Ruminants, for sheep and goat products. We now have mandatory registration of poultry keepers.

For bovine TB, the new Government is moving to phase out badger culling in favour of vaccination. With 2038 now the goal for eradication, future measures may well include more on biosecurity for farms and movements. DEFRA is to publish information to improve understanding of animal and herd-level bTB risk, with such data as the date and type of the most recent TB test completed in an animal’s herd and how long the animal has been in the herd. If this gives farmers a stronger sense of what they can control, it might be relevant to managing risks in livestock purchases.

Lacking the rigour of Australian-style systems, concerns remain as to whether the new Border Trade Operating Model (BTOM) is better at frustrating imports of commercially needed oil seed rape and tomato seeds than at excluding disease risks from imports, whether of animal or plant products, losing the island advantage.

In the Australian island, ExoFlare is being developed as an agritech answer, recently used across 700 sites to contain bird flu by tracking animal and human movements to identify disease risks and allow clean farms to operate. This work leads to digital audit trails that may come to be an expected part of international supply chains.

Biosecurity has been compared with the development of cyber security, even more exposed to international threat. The first steps there were firewalls, excluding risk like border controls. With their protection taken for granted, they were inevitably breached by hackers and lack of care. Then antivirus systems provided more local protection – as on farm biosecurity can against disease. Advancing technology may make genomics the coming step for biosecurity, like deep packet inspection, as part of the multi-layered defence needed to sustain reputable trade against accident or malice in an interconnected world.