Foreign animal diseases Lessons learnt regarding practitioners in animal health emergency management

摘要

One cannot convey on the printed page the emotional strain of the effects of a serious, sustained outbreak of a notifiable disease that causes the destruction of huge numbers of animals, many of them "friends" to their owners. This personal loss was far greater to the farmers and indeed to their workforce and those who service them than one can imagine before the start of the outbreak. I can well remember the loss of the highest yielding dairy cow in Britain in the 1967 epidemic, killed by a "rogue"journey from an infected area to a "clean" area that caused the extermination of a Friesian herd that had been built up over many generations. Even the slaughter teams found it difficult over many days to carry out the never-ending job. The only group of livestock farmers that escaped without too much culling were the pig farmers who had probably only about 4% of the animals that were killed.