Foot-and-mouth disease: what you can control

Our circle of influence

It's quite an honour to come off the bench. Hopefully I can keep up. So, a quick show of hands: who's watching the news and social media and just getting a little bit stressed, a little bit nervous? I am as well. I've spent a fair bit of time stitching up pig dogs on Saturday nights when the Wallabies are playing, and I'm not real keen to go back.

But as my cortisol level goes up, I think, well, what can I actually control in this environment? What can I control in this situation? That's really the topic of my talk today on foot-and-mouth disease: what is our circle of influence? If anyone's familiar with the concept of the circle of influence, I didn't make it up; it's a Stephen Covey thing, probably. The idea is that immediately around us are the things we can influence in our day-to-day lives. The next barrier beyond that is what we can influence partially, and beyond that is the things we can't influence at all.

How I see that happening in the sheep industry is that the things we have direct control over are the things we can do on our farm. That's our biosecurity practices, having plans, our knowledge level and our preparation. Beyond that, we have some influence. We have an ability to have some traceability, and we can influence the relationships we have with other people. The third one is our limited control. What goes on in Bali, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam is basically out of our control, and that's not something I think we should be spending too much of our energy on, because that's something our government's meant to do for us.

So what's the current state of play, living with foot-and-mouth disease? It's a risk that has been with us for a long time. Our risk has slightly increased with the incursion into Bali, but it hasn't been, to my mind, a drastic increase in our threat profile. Anyone who currently has a Bintang singlet or a Lao beer singlet in your cupboard right now, and I know there are some people in here who would be likely candidates for that, you've all been to countries that have foot-and-mouth disease as an endemic thing.

On this graph here, the red indicates endemic foot-and-mouth disease, so that's where the disease is there full time. Of course we're in the green zone, which is great. Now we're seeing incursions further south into Indonesia. But that's probably my first point: the threat matrix hasn't changed dramatically. It's just that now it's in an area that's a bit closer to home. We do have a lot of Australians going there, but we've got a lot of Australians going to other places with foot-and-mouth disease as well.

The good thing is that for foot-and-mouth disease to come into Australia, it actually has to jump a lot of barriers to get to us and get to a farm. Conversely, lumpy skin disease is a disease that's spread by insects, a biting midge, and that's currently in Asia now. For me that's probably more concerning, because it's more likely to get here. We can't control the entry points. We can't get an insect to put on its declaration whether it's been on a farm in the last 14 days. So in reality, that's the one that could really influence us more.

Lessons from the United Kingdom and Nepal

I have had some experience with foot-and-mouth disease. This is me in the United Kingdom in 2010 and 2011, well after they had their outbreak. The secret to unhappiness is high expectations. I moved to the United Kingdom thinking they'd give me some tweed and a Land Rover and I'd be James Herriot. They gave me a Peugeot 206, which is not really the boss car you're hoping for as a young veterinarian.

How this influenced my mind is that in the United Kingdom they view biosecurity very differently to biosecurity in Australia. Certainly in my first job out of uni, we'd wear the same overalls from job to job. When I moved to the UK, I tried to pull that on, even with wet weather gear, and I was quickly reprimanded. If you can't see it, that's one of those hairy cows, the hairy coos, and that's me doing a bit of Wild West foot trimming. Basically, biosecurity to them was ultra important. If any dirt came in on your boot, your boss would be telling you about it by the time the complaint phone call went in.

I was lucky enough to go to Nepal in 2018 with an Australian contingent looking at foot-and-mouth disease in that country. You can see here in this picture the reason why so many of these Asian countries have an endemic foot-and-mouth disease problem. They only own a handful of animals. It's a subsistence farming model, much harder to vaccinate and much harder to control. The irony is this lady owns that calf there with foot-and-mouth disease, and she's smiling. One of the challenges with foot-and-mouth disease, in a way, is that it is not fatal to adult animals.

In a village situation you might get some abortions, and you might get some deaths of neonates, but you actually don't get a lot of wholesale death and destruction. For us it's more of a trade disease. The impact on trade is so significant, which is why it's such a major disease of trade.

Know thy enemy

So when I'm thinking about foot-and-mouth disease, I'm thinking, know thy enemy. I can control the level of knowledge and preparedness I have on board. Basically, foot-and-mouth disease is very contagious. It causes fever and blisters and ulcers, typically on the feet, mouth, nose and teats. It affects all cloven-hoofed animals, but differently. In cattle it's very characteristic; you can see it a mile away. However, in sheep and goats it's a much more subtle disease, and typically the biggest thing we see is lame sheep.

Why this is so important is that because it's so subtle, it's able to get through, particularly in our marketplaces, and get around the place very quickly without really characteristic signs being seen. This was particularly important in the UK outbreaks. It got around very, very quickly before anyone raised the alarm.

So what's the incubation period? We know this from our COVID experience: it's the time between when we get an exposure to a disease and when we see clinical signs. Here that's the vesicles, the little blisters, and the lameness. That could be one to 14 days, so it's quite a long period. Why is that important to us? We need to have good traceability systems, because we've got to work backwards. By the time we get clinical signs, there's been a lot of movement going on, so we need to be able to get on the attack and work back very, very quickly.

So how does it spread? Of course it's spread by animals. It can be spread by wind, and by movement of fomites, which is the fancy word, but basically trucks can do it, contractors and feral animals.

Controlling the controllables

So out of that, what can we control with this disease? This is our circle, our plan. First, we can control our biosecurity to a large degree. We can control our preparedness, and we can control how we practise on farm, with things like hygiene and our buying practices as well.

First off, is biosecurity really that important? I look at biosecurity in three main ways. Basically, we're trying to prevent disease; we want to avoid the train wrecks. The second one is to detect disease. And the third one is to decrease disease treatment costs, and that can be in the long term or the short term, in terms of outbreak costs.

You might not be able to see it so well, but this is an example of a biosecurity plan. The building blocks of this plan are basically to create barriers and reduce risk. That's the concept I go through in my mind. I've just got a little easy one to do here: when we introduce livestock, do we put them in a period of quarantine? That's a practice we can do, and 21 days is recommended, as we saw before when we looked at incubation periods. That's for foot-and-mouth, but it covers a whole heap of other diseases as well. We can put that into practice on our farm, and that's something that gives us some control over the situation. So that's a really easy one there.

The next one is getting advice from experts and building relationships. That's something completely in our control in this situation. Do we have practices on board to prevent endemic diseases, the diseases we currently have? Are we involved with our local veterinarian or government veterinarian on a disease level, or on a yearly level even? I think as vets and as the sheep industry there's been a lot of uncoupling there, and at this stage we actually need to improve that.

This is a group of vets, all private vets, getting together on Monday down at the Bendigo saleyards. We all recognise that it goes back to what's in our sphere of control: how well we're prepared and how well we communicate with each other. So we're all getting together and making sure we're polishing up our skill sets.

The other thing about biosecurity is that it's not just about foot-and-mouth disease. We want to look at how we assess risk, how we manage risk and how we mitigate risk. I always think about it this way. I own a Toyota. I'm familiar with some of the things that go wrong with a Toyota, but not everything that goes wrong with a Toyota. That's why I've got Pete in Dubbo as part of my team, because he's my mechanic. I ask him what I need to do to put in a maintenance plan to stop my car breaking down, or to stop me blowing a tyre.

That's my comment here: biosecurity is all about getting expert help as well, because if you don't know what you don't know, how can you manage the risk of it? So for me it's really important to get expert help to understand those risks. We've got the big five: Johne's, lice, footrot, brucellosis and resistant worms. This is something I've seen so much of in the last year with clients. When we've done trades without understanding the risk, we've ended up with bigger problems than we expected. A great example is buying Western Australian sheep that have come through a Victorian saleyard. Huge risk, and I think people don't understand that risk. So if you don't know, you need to find someone who does.

This is a general biosecurity comment. Sheep don't move that much at all, and they certainly don't move through the central west of New South Wales very much at all. As a biosecurity risk, post-drought, in this part of the world and all of Australia, all bets are off. We actually have a lot of biosecurity risks. This is something I saw in the United Kingdom: the restocking after a foot-and-mouth outbreak causes so many diseases to come through, especially the endemic ones like Johne's, because there's so much movement. So I think the things we assumed about biosecurity pre-drought are over. We need higher levels of biosecurity, because we've got so much more movement of stock.

Traceability and EID

Just to give you an idea, this is some foot-and-mouth disease modelling out of Victoria, and you can see there are so many movements of sheep and cattle. This is the 29th of January 2015. If anyone's looking to upskill their knowledge and understand how foot-and-mouth disease works, there's a great YouTube video from the former chief veterinary officer of Victoria, Charles Milne. He's a Scottish guy who dealt with the outbreak in the UK, and he was one of the early ones to push for EID in Victoria. It shows you how quickly foot-and-mouth disease gets around and why it's so important to get on the attack early.

So what else can we partially control? Again, it's the speed of traceability. That's good records, external and internal, and national EID. The other thing I think we can partially control is having good discussions with your service providers, the agents and the rural vets. A lot of us are getting around, and I think this is a really good reminder for us as people who work and serve in the industry that we need to tighten our belts as well.

Speed of traceability is essential in a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. These are EID tags. I took this photo on Monday at the Bendigo saleyards. This animal has virulent footrot, or I suspect it does; there's a lot of under-running right up there. Talking to the staff at that saleyard, because Victoria has compulsory EID, within minutes they can work out where this sheep came from, where it's been and who the vendor was. Like I said before, minutes will be critical, because we don't have much time with foot-and-mouth disease going through, and the difference between an EID system and a mob-based system will be hours and days.

You can see here that hours and days will make a massive amount of difference to how far the disease will get, how fast we can respond to it and how fast we'll get out of it. So, to sum that up, there are three things we can do. We can control our controllables, what happens on our farm, and to do that I think everyone needs to get a biosecurity plan. You need to prepare, and you need to have your knowledge and training right. What can you partially control? Well, you can influence discussions on traceability within our systems and the relationships you have with your service providers. And for what we have limited control over: less social media, more biosecurity plans. That's it. Thank you very much.

Questions from the audience

Audience member: You talk about the increase in risk, and I'm assuming that's where it has gone from nine per cent to about 11. That's an average, and it spreads between three per cent and 20, which is a one in five chance. That's a really high chance. They've also done more profiling on the potential person who might bring foot-and-mouth into Australia, and that is a farmer going overseas and coming back to their farm. Would you mind just commenting on that statistic? It doesn't sound like a large movement, but the top end has gone from 19 to 20 and a half per cent, so it's a relatively concerning number.

Tim Gole: Certainly. Two comments on that. When you think about risk management, a small percentage risk with a catastrophic effect, regardless of whether it's seven per cent or nine per cent, I agree is a significant risk. You look at the Challenger space shuttle. The risk of those seals breaking was quite small, but we saw a catastrophic outcome for that shuttle.

The other one is outside of agriculture, where I think a lot of people should know better, and I think we should have targeted campaigns in that area. I think probably the biggest risk that's posed for foot-and-mouth disease to Australia is not actually through people who are directly involved in agriculture. It's probably someone who would be a second-generation Australian going back home, maybe their parents immigrated from Vietnam after the war, and they've gone back and they're bringing back pork dumplings, living in western Sydney, having a few pigs or something like that and feeding swill. I think that actually represents the biggest risk to our trade, but I don't know how to manage that. And yes, I'm not sure I've answered the question.

I suppose that's why I look at it and go, the risk profile's there, but I can't control a lot of those things, so what can I control? It's an interesting question, but it's scary either way, I think.

Audience member: How big an area will the stock standstill cover? My understanding is it'll be national. And this is something I just cannot understand: I haven't heard anybody say anything about pigs. What's going to happen about that problem? You can't control them.

Tim Gole: Yeah, for sure. I'll just be clear that my opinions are those of a private veterinarian; I don't represent Team Australia. But my understanding is that the modelling, whether you agree with it or not, suggests that pigs actually won't transmit the disease over large distances, because pigs don't interact as much as we might think. That's the modelling. But your concern, are pigs a vector, and if it got into the pigs would we be in a lot of trouble? A hundred per cent. It would certainly make it a lot more difficult. A hundred per cent, yeah, I'd agree with that completely.

Audience member: What would it look like in deer?

Tim Gole: I'm not as familiar with the clinical signs in deer, but I suspect they'd be similar to sheep. But to go back to the pig comment, one thing about pigs is that they're an amplifier host, so they make a lot more virus. They're just a big virus factory. I suppose that's where you're coming from: pigs represent a significant risk because they produce and shed the virus in such big numbers. But I'm not quite sure how deer fit into the scale of that.

Audience member: Will vaccination help?

Tim Gole: It will help us in the short term. The idea of vaccinating is that it'd be ring vaccination. There'd be a lot of modelling based on stock movements, and wind, which is another big one, and we'd ring vaccinate around an outbreak to create a firebreak, I suppose. That's how we'd use it, to my understanding. Australia has a bank of foot-and-mouth vaccines currently held in the UK, and the agreement is that the moment it's needed, it gets sent straight out.

Interestingly enough, on a bit of trivia, Australia doesn't hold any live foot-and-mouth disease virus, even in the high-security facility in Geelong, which is probably one of the top five animal facilities in the world, because the risk of it getting out is so great. Certainly one of the UK outbreaks came out of a facility.

Audience member: You say the wind?

Tim Gole: Yes. I know it can go across from France to the Isle of Wight, but that's about as far as I know. It's significant, depending on the modelling.

The vaccination program is really about trying to create a firebreak, because the other challenge with the vaccine is that in vaccinated animals, my understanding is that some of the proteins from the vaccine can still turn up in the blood test as foot-and-mouth. They can't distinguish between foot-and-mouth disease from a vaccine and a natural strain. I think that happened in Taiwan. My understanding is they vaccinated a whole stack of pigs, but no one would lift the trade restrictions, because they said, well, if you're vaccinating, we can't tell the difference, so you must still have it.

Audience member: And how long does that last?

Tim Gole: I think it's a fairly short-term arrangement, but I'm not 100 per cent on that one.

Audience member: What should people do with their clothes if they've been overseas?

Tim Gole: Great question. When I went to Nepal, we came back with the clothes on our backs. Certainly, if you were going on farm in a country with endemic foot-and-mouth disease, I think those joggers probably shouldn't come back. Coming back from Nepal, it was a 14-day quarantine from going on any farms, and I think all your clothes need to be soaked in citric acid. It's something you just add in and let it soak. But generally, if I was going on a farm tour to Nepal or Thailand or somewhere like that, I'd just go to Vinnies on my way over and wouldn't bring much back.