Further measures to ease the equine influenza burden

National Management Group, Friday, 26 October 2007

The National Management Group (NMG) overseeing the response to equine influenza has reaffirmed that the focus of the response continues to be control of the disease with a view to eradication. It also reaffirmed the importance it attaches to minimising the social and economic impact of the disease on horse owners through a number of new measures.

At its most recent meeting, NMG also welcomed further news of positive developments in the disease response including moves to resume racing at Randwick, the return to work of police horses in Sydney, and the finalisation of a protocol to allow the inter-State movement of horses from infected to non-infected States.

Mindful of the high costs of the equine influenza response on horse owners, NMG has moved to ease the burden by broadening the use of vaccination to more aggressively contain and eradicate the disease and free up movement controls in certain zones.

Further strategic vaccination of horses will be undertaken with up to 240,000 horses expected to be vaccinated by early 2008. An allocation and distribution schedule is being developed based on business cases and ongoing provision and refinement of data from industry.

Guidelines have been released for this purpose and national horse sectors have been invited to lodge business cases for vaccine allocations.

Proposals will need to be consistent with nationally agreed objectives for vaccination and include targeted surveillance, identification, tracing, auditing and on-going biosecurity arrangements.

• Business cases will need to include evidence about:
• The vaccine’s proposed use within an identifiable sector of horses
• Details there is an accountable organisation responsible for all aspects of vaccine holding and use that can audit, identify and track all vaccinated horses
• The accountable organisation’s rules, authority and capability to control the activity of horses and people, the application of penalties and sanctions, and the system to trace horses and people moving to and from events or training locations, and
• The biosecurity measures to be applied on the movement of horses and people within each location to prevent the potential exposure of other horses to the virus.

NMG stressed it was keeping a constant check on both the direct and indirect costs of containment and eradication efforts and identified that future priorities to assist the industry included:

• progressively moving restriction zones from “red” to “purple” to allow the greater movement of horses
• authorisation for horse gatherings
• the vaccination of high risk horses within infected jurisdictions and strategic vaccination in non infected jurisdictions
• development of protocols and timelines with industry to restore normal business, and
• maintaining layered barriers to control disease spread using zones and state barriers.

While the priority for vaccination remains existing buffer zones around high concentrations of the disease in NSW and Queensland, NMG also moved to create a small national contingency supply of vaccine to support buffers that might be required for disease control purposes should the need arise in the future.

NMG is comprised of the Chief Executive Officers of the Commonwealth and State/Territory departments of agriculture/primary industries across Australia and also the heads of the peak bodies representing the horse industry. It is chaired by the Secretary of the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Dr Conall O’Connell.

(Note: As far as vaccination priorities for EFA competition horses are concerned, the first group to be considered will be horses with current performance cards. Depending on the quantities of vaccine made available, this may need to be broken down further to progressive ranking from the top level of competition downward.)