Less than a third of the FMD shots given in Indonesia

Six months down the track and the FMD outbreak in Indonesia has slowed but it is not all good news.

Indonesia’s outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease is slowing as vaccination rates rise - but the true status of the disease remains unknown due to a lack of accurate data.

Six months after FMD was first found in the Australian holiday island favourite Bali, its rapid spread seems to have subsided following efforts to vaccinate the nation’s cattle, sheep and pigs, ex-Australian veterinary surgeon and Bali-local Dr Ross Ainsworth says.

But government officials are struggling to keep accurate numbers of moves to contain the outbreak.

“The FMD vaccination program is slogging along although it is very difficult to understand the true state of the control program as the government reporting arrangements are nowhere near adequate to make any sensible assessment,” Dr Ainsworth said.

“National cattle numbers are not known or, if they are, they are not made public.

“If nine million head have been vaccinated, what proportion of the herd is that?

“What proportion of those vaccinations were the second dose?”

Officially, about 9.3 million vaccinations had been given by the end of the year, of which about 10 per cent were in Bali.

Dr Ainsworth said if the national cattle herd was about 14 million, as some sources claimed, then two doses for each, or 28 million vaccinations, were needed before the cattle herd was well protected, with a third shot necessary for strong and ongoing protection.

The current estimate of nine million doses is about a third of that which is required to give that protection.

Vaccine shortages are not the issue, though, with the funding and resources for the actual delivery of the vaccine into stock holding the program back.

“This is especially expensive when the average cattle owner has only two head of cattle so the logistics of locating, visiting, completing biosecurity measures, vaccinating each animal with a single use syringe etc then packing up and moving to the next farmer is an extremely slow and expensive process,” Dr Ainsworth said.

“It will therefore take years to achieve a strong level of herd protection.”