Recent outbreaks show the need for animal disease surveillance.

by Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer

Over the past five months, we certainly have seen how important it is to have a diligent, well-funded animal disease surveillance system staffed by experts in their fields.

 

Last December, routine surveillance turned up a case of contagious equine metritis in a central Kentucky quarter horse stallion. An investigation turned up 18 stallions in six states (including four in Kentucky) and five mares in three states that tested positive for CEM. Approximately 750 horses in 47 states were exposed to the organism that causes the disease. Thanks to quick and aggressive action by our state veterinarian’s office, our partners at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and private practitioners, Kentucky is well on its way to regaining CEM-free status with minimal disruption of the 2009 quarter horse breeding season.

 

That action did not come without a cost. At the recent annual conference of the Southern Animal Health Association in Lexington, our state veterinarian’s office reported that testing and treatment of horses in Kentucky infected or exposed to CEM has cost the state Department of Agriculture in excess of $160,000 so far.

But the cost of inaction would have been far greater. A CEM outbreak in Kentucky in 1978 cost the Thoroughbred industry an estimated $1 million a day.

 

Now a new hybrid flu strain is spreading in the United States and around the world. While this strain has not been identified in Kentucky (at this writing) and has not been found in swine or any other animal, State Veterinarian Robert C. Stout has increased surveillance at Kentucky livestock markets and has alerted the state’s livestock disease diagnostic laboratories in Lexington and Hopkinsville to test all swine samples for this strain.

 

Understandably, people have reacted to this outbreak with great concern. Unfortunately, sales of pork products have fallen sharply as a result of the outbreak, even though experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USDA repeatedly have stated that people cannot catch this strain by eating properly handled and cooked pork products. Once again, the value of careful surveillance and a source of timely, accurate information is evident.

 

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture is a consumer protection and service agency that touches every Kentuckian every day. Make sure your legislators know you value the Department’s services.