Originally from: Farmtalking
                        
Hi Paul!

Many apologies for not having done the research myself – I'm really snowed under with work at the mo' and 'snow' to boot this morning!

However, the facts with regard to vaccinated milk.

'Supermarkets won't accept vaccinated milk' was a rumour well trumpeted by the NFU and others during 2001.

The reason for this was quite simply their fear that once stock was vaccinated we would lose our FMD Free Status, preventing exports to other FMD Free contries.

That status would remain lost until one year after the last animal was vaccinated, becuase the vaccine is short-acting and it's protected lasts for approximately one year.

We had already lost FMD Free Status once our stock contracted FMD. However, that would be recoverd if slaughter was deemed to have eliminated the disease, as was the case.

However, although 'meat' was the the commodity spoken of and 'published' following the meeting at Chequers in April 2001, the supermarkets quite rightly stated that if vaccination was to be used as a preventative,/control of FMD, they would accept vaccinated products. (After all, the public was already consuming them and had done so for years!).

Nestle, who purchased a large quantity of milk, issued a statement to say they would not accept vaccinated milk unless vaccination was the norm' and all milk was vaccinated.

For many of us, including myself, although understanding the importance of our export trade and the success of our FMD Free Status in recent years, we realised that to strive to maintain it in this manner was not only extremely cruel but in the circumstances rather ridiculous.

We quickly learnt three important things.

1. The FMD Vaccine maybe short acting but is one of the most efficacious vaccines known to man at the present time. Dr. Ruth Watkins, the eminent virologist told us that FMD could be eliminated from the world in a remakably short time if it was adopted by all affected countries, (in much the same way as polio' has almost been eliminated). Although there are different straines of the disease we also learnt that the vaccine could be made to cope with all fof them.

2. The strain with which our stock was infected, Pan Asian 'O', was rapidly spreading across the world and therefore to imagine we could remain FMD free for any length of time without vaccination seemed unrealistic. In addition, we knew that Uruguay had suffered an outbreak of the disease during 2001 and successfully controlled it with vaccination within eight weeks.

As Coleen and Francis have mentioned there are references available to these facts on the Internet, not only on Farmtalking and Warmwell bur in Hansard, various scientific sites etc.

I hope this is helpful – and will try to do more later if I get the time

Best wishes – Jane