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IFA animal health chairman Bert Stewart has reacted angrily to the findings presented to Animal Health Ireland Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) Implementation Group by CVERA and Hans-Herman Thulke that "there is no viable alternative to tissue tagging to achieve BVD eradication."
Stewart has called on Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed to immediately review the structures and funding model of the programme.
Under the original conditions of the programme, which began for farmers in January 2013, the programme would consist of 3 years of tissue tagging followed by 3 years of lower intensity surveillance.
However, according to Stewart, no surveillance has been offered this year meaning that farmers have had to continue with the costly tissue tagging element.
The findings presented to Animal Health Ireland BVD Implementation Group by CVERA and Thulke which show there is no lower-cost alternative to tagging explain this decision.
Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal, Stewart said the IFA highlighted these concerns more than two years ago, and the "assertion that farmers were to blame for the programme developer’s failure to offer a lower cost testing option within herds because they were holding onto PI (persistently infected) calves has now been proven as incorrect".
"Serious questions to answer"
Stewart added that the experts who designed the Irish programme "have serious questions to answer to farmers following these revelations this late into the programme".
"They tried monitoring and blood sampling to reduce rates of BVD in Switzerland and it didn't work, so why didn't the people who designed this programme take that into account?" he asked.
"The extra testing and costs this serious error will impose on farmers in order to achieve eradication of BVD by them having to continue with tissue tagging is unacceptable and must be addressed through the establishment of a new funding model," he added.
According to Stewart, the cost to farmers of the tissue tagging and testing element of the BVD programme is approximately €9m per year.
While he was positive about progress achieved so far and the objective of zero PI calves by 2020, Animal Health Ireland chief executive Joe O'Flaherty told the Irish Farmers Journal that his main concern for the near future of the BVD eradication programme lies in the change of procurement rules for cattle tags. A new system is due later this year to approve multiple tag suppliers. "We are very keen to ensure that this new tag approval process doesn't interfere with the logistics of BVD testing," he said, whether for farmers or for the laboratories currently approved to test for BVD?
The Irish Farmers Journal has contacted the Department of Agriculture for comment but has yet to receive a response.
BVD
Bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) is a highly contagious viral disease of cattle that can be transmitted as easily as the common cold. It can be spread directly by infected animals, or indirectly, for example by contaminated equipment or visitors.
The national BVD eradication programme was developed by a cross-industry BVD Implementation Group led by Animal Health Ireland.
The number of PIs has decreased considerably since the beginning of the programme, with 13,868 confirmed PI calves in 2013. In 2015 this number more than halved, with just 6,267 calves testing positive for BVD.
So far in 2016, just over 2m calves have been tested, with over 99% of these testing negative for BVD. Out of the 1% which tested positive, 0.15% (3,046 calves) are confirmed PIs.
A study carried out around the time the eradication programme began estimated that the disease caused annual losses in Ireland of €102m. However, this figure has likely decreased since the start of the programme.
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