The National Pork Producers Council is calling on the U.S. government to provide one billion dollars over five years to fund the creation of a Foot and Mouth Disease vaccine bank. [Source: Farmscape.ca, June 20, 2017 by Bruce Cochrane]
A Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak would potentially cost U.S. agriculture an estimated 200 billion dollars over 10 years. David Herring, the Vice-President of the National Pork Producers Council, says global Foot and Mouth vaccine production capacity is at its limit and in the event of a Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in the U.S. there would not be vaccine available to respond.
Clip-David Herring-National Pork Producers Council:
“USDA APHIS changed our policy a few years back from trying to stamp out an FMD outbreak through euthanization to a vaccination protocol. The only thing we didn’t do, and the industry agreed with change, is we didn’t allocate any monies or do anything for the production of the vaccine. So our ask in our farm bill coming up next year is for our government to help fund the cost to put the vaccine bank into place. Today currently we’re very unprepared for the outbreak. We store antigen at Plum Island, New York. There’s basically 10 antigen stereotypes that are stored there today but our concern is there’s not enough capacity in the world to produce the needs that we would have to have in the first couple of weeks of outbreak. The total ask for this is to get prepared to be able to handle an outbreak if it did occur.”
Herring says the U.S. pork industry is calling for 250 million dollars per year over the next five years to ensure the necessary vaccine is available, to help fund increased surveillance to detect FMD or other disease outbreaks and to help individual states prepare for an outbreak.