The BVD programme is currently a voluntary one that is run by Animal Health Ireland. Essentially, the disease costs the industry €102 million a year. The overall cost over a three-year programme is estimated at €60 million. The investment of €60 million by the industry over a three-year or four-year period will save €102 million every year. It is a voluntary scheme at the moment and the uptake is high. More than 500,000 people have received additional tags to take samples. It is a significant uptake of a voluntary scheme in this country. The intention is that there would be a compulsory eradication programme next year. We are currently in discussions with Animal Health Ireland on the types of controls the Department might need to put in place in terms of legislation to ensure people participate. While I cannot say for certain the intention is that every calf born next year would be tested. The programme is an innovative one which is built upon taking a tissue tag rather than taking a blood sample from an animal. The uptake has been positive. We look forward to agreeing on next year's programme with Animal Health Ireland.
We have reduced the number of regional offices from 28 to 16. We were able to do that on the basis of utilising the technology in which we have invested in recent years. We have computerised many of our records. We are satisfied that we have a good geographical spread of offices to provide on-farm coverage from an animal health perspective.
Imports are always something of which one must be conscious. We must also be conscious that we are part of the European Union and that we are a significant exporter ourselves. We have a consistent monitoring of what is happening within Europe and across the world on what animal health issues are in play at any point. If we are free of a disease we can look for additional guarantees on imports. In certain cases we make a case to prove we have no disease. If we can prove we do not have a particular disease in this country we can seek additional guarantees on imports. The blue tongue situation was a case in point. We were able to prove that we did not have blue tongue. Therefore, we were able to get additional guarantees on blue tongue in regard to imports. Certain requirements are in place for the trade in animals across all of Europe in regard to certain diseases, namely, TB, brucellosis, leukosis, blue tongue and BSE. Anyone exporting animals to this country must apply those controls and carry out whatever tests may be necessary.
The fallen animal scheme was mentioned in a few contributions. The Department took a view some time ago that other than providing a subsidy towards requirements from our perspective towards carrying out BSE surveillance and scrapie surveillance, the cost of fallen animals must be carried by the industry. I would not envisage any rowing back on that.
I will now turn to Deputy Colreavy's questions. Staff in the Department and in local offices spend an amount of time on animal welfare. There are requirements for us to carry out welfare checks on farms, which we do on a yearly basis. It is an element of cross-compliance and single farm payment, which was raised, that people must comply with certain animal welfare requirements. The animal health and welfare Bill will come before the Oireachtas shortly. Through it the Department will legislate for animal welfare generally. It is updating legislation from 1911 to reflect the contemporary position. It puts a more positive perspective on the requirements to provide for animal welfare rather than on the prosecution of someone for cruelty to animals. That is reflected in much EU legislation that has been introduced in recent years.
On where we stand in terms of a database of diseases, the World Organisation for Animal Health, OIE, is based in Paris, and comprises 178 members around the world. We all provide data to it which are available on its website. We provide quarterly and yearly reports on a range of diseases. The information on the levels of prevalence of particular diseases in different countries is available internationally. It is the international benchmark for exotic epizootic diseases. We have to convince it we do not have foot and mouth disease or swine flu. After 2001 we had to undertake a significant amount of surveillance to prove no foot and mouth disease remained in the country.
Schmallenberg virus is new and from the same family of viruses found across Australasia and in the Far East. The disease is caused by similar viruses, has a relatively low morbidity rate and does not cause a lot of sickness in animals. They may be off feed or production for a couple of days. Some viruses have been shown to cause congenital defects in some newborn animals and are restricted to cattle and sheep.
The most commonly referenced is Akabane virus in Australia. The OIE, which is the international benchmark on disease, does not impose any restrictions on trade in respect of the virus. A lot of data is being collected on Schmallenberg, which suggests it is fairly widespread across western Europe and consistent with the spread of the disease at last summer.
A significant number of herds are showing evidence of infection with few clinical signs. Notwithstanding the spread of the virus, herds in eight countries across Europe, including the UK, show congenital abnormalities. Just over 2,000 herds in those countries have reported congenital abnormalities. The countries involved include the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France and Spain.
A lot of activity is happening at European level to try to co-ordinate and collate all the data. The European Food Safety Authority, EFSA, provides scientific advice to the Commission and is collating data. It expects to publish an interim report on 31 March on its evaluation of the significance of the data which has been found so far.
In regard to Schmallenberg, there is no evidence it has any public health significance. The virus has been around for the past ten or 11 months. Surveillance of people who have been in contact with animals showed no sign of exposure to the virus. No clinical signs are associated with it and there is no public health issue associated with it or any of the family of viruses related to it.
At national level we have given some publicity to the information on the Department's website. We produced a number of articles for the Irish Farmers’ Journal and a number of other media have carried articles. We plan to update our website after the EFSA publication at the end of this week. A group in the Department, chaired by the Secretary General, reviews our response to Schmallenberg on an ongoing basis.
In our laboratories we have, I understand, 74 examples from 66 animals submitted by practitioners from farms where congenitally abnormal foetuses were found and all were negative. Most were from cattle firms. The thinking is that the number of identified problems on sheep farms within Europe has decreased over recent weeks. The peak at sheep level seems to have passed.
The expectation is that the virus infects lambs early in pregnancy which causes congenital abnormalities. There is some expectation that over the next month the number of cases in cattle might increase. It is something we will monitor over the next four to six weeks because the gestation period for cattle is nine months whereas for sheep it is six months.
With regard to North-South communication, we have a very close working relationship with Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in Northern Ireland on animal health matters in particular. Not alone are there contacts at local level across the Border where information is passed back and forth between local offices, there are also regular North-South working group meetings on animal health covering a range of issues, a small number of which are of international concern. There is regular contact between the various departments to try to align our responses to potential threats.
The situation reflects the attitude to bluetongue. There was a close working relationship between Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. An east-west approach was taken to the problem. North and South worked together to try to minimise the risk of disease spreading from Britain to the island of Ireland.
Fracking is something we will note. There are some suggestions in the literature that animal health issues could arise. If it comes to pass we will feed into the process and investigate the matter if needs be. Genetic modification involves the plant rather than the animal health side.
Deputy Deering compared TB and brucellosis. As I said in my presentation, disease eradication is complex and the methodologies and challenges posed differ from disease to disease. The technologies available for testing, the manifestation of disease and the extent to which a disease can remain undetected in animals over periods of time are different. Brucellosis only affects pregnant females whereas TB could affect all 7 million cattle on the island. Different challenges and tools are available.
Reference was made to the lack of progress over the past 50 years, which is something of which no one can be proud. However, we need to understand the challenges. It was only in the 1990s it became apparent a wildlife reservoir was contributing to the disease. A lot of effort was made between the 1950s and 1990s to try to eradicate disease when infection was being fed back into cattle and we were not aware of that. It was only when we carried out the east Offaly project in the 1990s that we demonstrated that, within Ireland, wildlife, in particular badgers, played a significant role in the perpetuation of disease in cattle.
Mr. Healy will deal with costs. We have no significant problem with licences to capture badgers. We are licensed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service to capture them. We have a working relationship with the service and apply for a licence every year. We negotiate with it.
On whether Department staff or veterinary practitioners should test restricted herds, there are approximately 276 vets in the Department. They cover laboratories, the district veterinary office, DVO, side of things, and the veterinary public health side. In recent years we have begun to increase the amount of testing carried out by departmental vets on the basis of the reduction in brucellosis and in activities in regard to BSE. There has been a greater focus on the TB programme as we have been able to devolve more staff back to it.
The number of visits that take place in regard to herd restrictions is an issue we have been examining in recent years. I hope someone who is restricted today will not be telling me the same story as was outlined today. We have fine tuned and aligned many of our activities and interaction with farmers. The number of interactions with farmers should be much more co-ordinated and less scattered than the experience outlined. All of the systems are based on ensuring certain activities take place, information is passed on, and checks are carried out. We have a renewed focus on ensuring the test is carried out as well as possible. We have sought to enhance and improve our quality control of testing, to ensure restricted reactor animals are segregated, and that milk from reactor animals is controlled such that it is not being fed back to other animals or going for processing.
A number of speakers raised the issue of the restriction on neighbouring herds and inconclusive reactor tests. They are two specific projects we introduced this year, both of which are based on research evaluation of the available data. We can make the information available subsequently but I do not have it with me. In the context of the contiguous herds, if one goes to the market and purchases an animal, one is three to four times more likely to have a reactor if one buys an animal sold from a contiguous herd within four months of testing than if one buys an animal from a herd that was not contiguous to a restricted herd. Our data on inconclusive animals show that if an inconclusive animal which passes a test is sold on that it is ten times more likely to be a reactor in the future than any other animal in even the same herd which was not inconclusive. We find the data compelling.
Deputy Ann Phelan raised the issue of cattle and eradicating TB without eradicating the badger population. We are doing exciting research on the vaccination of badgers which is an alternative to their eradication. We have carried out much research in the past ten years in controlled environments and recently we took the experiments into the field and vaccinated badgers in the wild. We will assess the efficacy of vaccinating badgers in the context of the transmission of TB within the badger population and between badgers and cattle.
We have two different projects. In one place we are capturing and orally vaccinating badgers and in another place we are capturing and injecting badgers with vaccine. It will be a couple of years before we have data which will tell us one way or another how successful is the approach, but it is our ambition and expectation that this will have an impact on the dynamic of disease passing between wildlife such as badgers and cattle. The hypothesis is that if one reduces the infection burden by population reduction or vaccination so that disease is not being transmitted, there will be an improvement in the situation. We are not necessarily saying badgers will not get infected but they will not be so infected that they will become infective and pass on the disease to another animal. The research is ongoing and it probably will be two years before we have any hard data emerging from it. One project will finish this year and it will take approximately a year to do the laboratory work and to obtain proof. We hope that in 2014 we will be able to speak with greater certainty on when the ultimate objective of eradicating TB will be achievable.
The locking up of contiguous herds is triggered by an on-farm investigation by a veterinary inspector who will determine the extent of where the infected fragment is and the contiguous herds in that regard. It could be that there would not be a blanket application of a restriction; it is about assessing the likely infectivity of an outbreak on a farm. For instance, if one has ten reactors and there has not been a test in the past four months, one's neighbours will be restricted until they are tested. They are only restricted until they test. The reason is to ensure they do not sell animals that could be infected to the 97% of other farmers who might buy them but those people can still sell animals for slaughter.
We dealt with the Schmallenberg virus. On the importation of calves, we are an exporting country and we operate within the same rules in the EU. Animals coming to us have to satisfy the same rules with regard to assurance, TB, brucellosis and other issues, depending on from where they come. Specifically, we get assurance on blue tongue.
Senator O'Neill raised the question of the application of the additional controls we have put in place on contiguous and inconclusive animals. We can provide the data later. We are satisfied the data show us the additional risk that exists. The data on inconclusive reactors are particularly compelling. The data show the additional risk is multiplied three to four times when buying an animal from a farm contiguous with a TB reactor if they have not tested in the previous four months.
