Private sector warns SA’s foot-and-mouth plan risks collapse

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JEREMY MAGGS: South Africa’s ongoing fight against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is facing a blunt warning from the private sector – the current vaccination plan may be almost certain to fail.

FMD Response South Africa says government’s strategy of vaccinating 80% of cattle by December this year is too slow to achieve what’s termed herd immunity, particularly when vaccine protection may begin waning after about six months.

The group goes on to say the only viable route is a rapid national campaign vaccinating the country’s 14 million cattle within six to eight weeks, with private sector distribution playing a far bigger role.

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This is becoming an important issue as far as food security in South Africa is concerned. Andrew Morphew is with me now, who speaks for FMD Response South Africa.

Andrew, welcome to you, and your organisation says the current strategy has a 90% to 95% chance of failure. Tell me why it is mathematically an unworkable idea.

ANDREW MORPHEW: Jeremy, thanks for having me on. We do say at the moment that it has a 90% to 95% chance of failure. Really, when you look at these numbers, there are a lot of different variables.

Most of those are on the execution side, cold chain distribution, application, your wildlife-cattle interface and things like that. Those are incredibly important.

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But there’s one strategic variable that really makes or breaks the entire plan, and that is where we in South Africa are falling down at the moment, and that is vaccine timing.

The government’s stated goal at the moment is to vaccinate 80% of South Africa’s cattle by December. So essentially 80% of the national herd over a 12-month period. Now when you have a look at that, this is where the maths begins to fall down.

Vaccines only provide six months’ worth of immunity. So you start to vaccinate in month one, when you get to month six, the animal that you vaccinated in month one is now losing its immunity.

As you then carry on, immunity is collapsing behind you as fast as you are creating it.

So what that invariably means is that at any given point in time, your best-case scenario is that you’ve only really got 35% immunity in the herd, and the World Organisation for Animal Health asks for 80%.

That is the gap, the gap between the 35% that we can achieve and the 80% that the World Organisation for Animal Health wants. That is what kills the plan completely.

JEREMY MAGGS: Andrew, your suggestion is 14 million within six to eight weeks. All well and good, but realistically, does the country have the capacity to do that?

ANDREW MORPHEW: Jeremy, the country does have the capacity to do that. I’ll start by saying that while it’s a big number and it is a big job, we’re not saying it’s an easy task, there are countries like Brazil and Argentina that did far bigger numbers.

Argentina did 60 million cattle, and in doing it that way, they vaccinated once, they then repeated that vaccination in six months and they closed their outbreak.

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They prevented the virus from spreading. They stopped the spread of foot-and-mouth in 11 months. And that is what we could do if we really put our minds to it.

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In Brazil, the logistics are far worse than ours. They were flying vaccines into the Amazon, they were floating it down the Amazon in boats, and they’ve got well over 100 million cattle in that country. So it’s something that has been proven to work and it’s something that other countries have achieved.

Then coming back to South Africa. If you look at what we can mobilise, in South Africa, 34 vets have proven in a single day when they have vaccine, they vaccinated 50 000 animals. If you extrapolate that out, it’s possible.

There are a lot of hands in the country, it is just about getting vaccine into those hands and doing it in a way that is, one, responsible and, two, that we can prove to the World Organisation for Animal Health we’ve done that vaccination.

JEREMY MAGGS: It seems to me the Department of Agriculture, though, wants to retain control of vaccine distribution. And your suggestion is that’s a recipe for failure.

ANDREW MORPHEW: That is a recipe for failure. So we’ve created a single channel of supply. When you’re looking at risk, redundancy is one of the things that you need to put into a supply chain.

If one supplier goes down, if one company can’t afford to pay a supplier, we need to have another supply line coming into the country. So we need multiple supply lines, and we need those to be distributed privately.

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The vets already have cold chains running every single day. The fewer times you handle a vaccine, the less risk there is of cold chain failure. If we can make those supply chains direct and we can get vaccines into the country fast, then we can get on top of this.

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And you’re right, South Africa looks at it from a control perspective. We’re almost looking at it as an administrative problem. How do we control this?

Whereas Brazil and Argentina looked at the biology of the disease, they said we’ve got to vaccinate our entire national population in tight campaign windows, and they then built their systems backwards from there to make that work. We’ve not done that.

JEREMY MAGGS: Andrew, have farmers lost or are they losing confidence at this point in the national response and by extension, the minister (John Steenhuisen)?

ANDREW MORPHEW: Jeremy, we want to work with the minister and the government to sort this out. We’ve lost confidence in the plan, and we can see that the plan, one, cannot work and, two, has already begun to fail.

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Last week there were two cases where vaccinated dairy herds were infected by unvaccinated neighbours, and that is really exactly what we’re saying.

Unless we can flood areas with vaccine, vaccinate every single animal, the virus will continue to spread, and we will never get on top of it.

We want to work with the government. We have every confidence that if we are able to vaccinate every animal in the country in tight cyclical windows and repeat that at six months, then we can get on top of this.

JEREMY MAGGS: Thank you very much indeed. In conversation there with Andrew Morphew, who’s spokesperson for FMD Response SA organisation.

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