Partnering to Prevent Disease
Bruce I. Knight, Under Secretary for
Marketing and Regulatory Programs
Academy of Veterinary Consultants
Denver, CO
November 30, 2007
Thank you, Bob (Larson). I’m delighted to join you today to talk about our partnership in preventing disease and share with you some new plans we have.
As veterinarians, you are on the front lines in diagnosing and treating bovine illness. Your clients depend upon your judgment and guidance.
In turn, USDA and state vets depend upon you to spot potential problems and help us address them quickly. When producers have questions about the health of their herd, you are their primary source of information and the one they trust the most.
That gives you a unique opportunity to join us in promoting animal identification and assuring farmers of the need for and value of this effort to safeguard animal health.
Since the National Animal Identification System is a voluntary program, we must convince producers that it will benefit them and their neighbors. And to do that we need your help.
Importance of NAIS
Whenever I speak to farmers and ranchers, I remind them that NAIS is all about their animals, their livelihood, their future. But it’s also vital to all of us who have invested our lives in keeping livestock healthy.
NAIS has been—and will continue to be—one of USDA’s top priorities. This system moves beyond USDA programs that concentrate on eradicating or controlling individual diseases. It’s a partnership effort among USDA, state and local officials, producers, veterinarians and industry to enable us to quickly address disease outbreaks.
I want to make clear that NAIS is not so much something new as it is an updated, modernized and integrated approach to animal identification and tracing. Our ultimate goal is to have data in our hands within 48 hours of an incident.
We’re looking for a rapid response when a disease outbreak occurs. We want to significantly reduce the time needed to investigate disease outbreaks. Currently, the average time it takes to complete a bovine TB investigation is 199 days. And it took us 10 months to investigate exotic Newcastle Disease in California five years ago.
In contrast, NAIS offers comprehensive, state-of-the-art solutions that will work more effectively than the system we have now. Building the system has been hard work. We’re committed to facilitating traceability. But we’ve had a hodgepodge of databases focused on specific diseases that we need to integrate and update, and our success in major disease eradication programs has led to fewer animals in disease programs and thus fewer animals identified.
To create NAIS, we needed to coordinate federal and state responsibilities. And we need to further strengthen partnerships with industry and with you, our allies in protecting animal health.
Cost of Disease
I don’t need to tell you that animal diseases are costly. Responding more quickly will help cut losses, reduce delays and retain markets. Let me give you just a couple recent examples of the cost of disease outbreaks.
Take bovine TB, for example. Since 2002, USDA has spent about $130 million on indemnities and control activities for diseased or suspect cattle. Over the past five years, more than 25,000 cows have been destroyed. Since 2004, nearly 790,000 cows have been tested to prevent the spread of bovine TB.
Then there’s BSE. The discovery of BSE in one cow in the U.S. in December 2003 brought our export market to a crashing halt. We lost 80 percent of our international beef trade in 2004. USDA also spent $5 million investigating the outbreak and later $189 million on the enhanced BSE surveillance program.
Premises Registration
The key to safeguarding animal agriculture in the U.S. is to get everyone involved in NAIS. The first step is for every producer to register his or her premises.
We need to know where the herds and flocks are so that if a problem arises we can notify everyone who has livestock or poultry. This includes veterinarians who have facilities where livestock or horses are kept.
Today, we have nearly 427,000 premises registered nationwide out of an estimated 1.4 million. We have the states and Tribes active in NAIS outreach to thank for these results. To boost premises registrations, USDA has signed cooperative agreements with partner organizations including:
- the National Pork Board
- the FFA
- the USAIO
- IDairy
- the American Angus Association
- the American Sheep Institute—and
- just signed this morning—the NCB Foundation.
Registration is free and quick—and it enables us to alert producers when an outbreak occurs.
Your Partnership
This is where we most need your help also—getting you and your customers to sign up. The regulatory vets in APHIS and the states are not the key to NAIS.
You are.
You are responsible for 80 percent of the fed cattle in this country. The majority of these animals show up at feedlots with some form of unique identification. However, in many cases, this ID is removed at the feedlot gate. A simple action, but one that unfortunately effectively ends the ability to trace the animal to its birth premises.
Private sector veterinarians are indispensable in making NAIS work. Our partnership with private practice veterinarians is a century old this year, dating back to the need for vets to help inspect large numbers of horses being exported to Canada.
The formal accreditation program began in 1921, and USDA and livestock producers owe a great debt to the accredited veterinarians who’ve helped in our efforts to eradicate brucellosis and TB. Accredited vets serve as our agents—our eyes and ears. If anything’s not right, we count on you to contact our local offices and alert us. And in an outbreak situation, we turn to private vets to supplement our staff through the Veterinary Reserve Corps—helping talk with producers and testing, quarantining and disposing of animals.
What’s going to make the difference in making animal ID viable is the strong, positive recommendation of private practice veterinarians like yourselves. You are the ones who interact regularly with farmers and ranchers.
If animal ID is going to work, it’s going to be because veterinarians tell everyone in their practice that this is the right thing to do—that signing up for NAIS will benefit them and their neighbors and everyone in the livestock business.
We will succeed to the extent that we meet what I call the Dr. Heczur test. We’ll know when NAIS is truly mainstream, when vets like Dr. Heczur—my home vet—understand and recommend NAIS to their clients. And that’s what I’m asking of you today.
Please take the time to familiarize yourself with NAIS. We have a great website at www.usda.gov/nais that provides all the details, including answers to frequently asked questions.
Speaking of questions, please let us know if you have any. We want to answer them! And then please recommend the system wholeheartedly to the farmers and feedlot operators in your practice. When they ask if this is something they need to be involved in, I want each of you to be able to respond with an unqualified “YES!”
Further, you may want to register your own premises. I want you to be aware that Premises Identification Numbers, or PINS, are going to become more important in veterinary practice as well. These numbers can be used on certificates of veterinary inspection, test charts and brucellosis vaccination records.
The Business Plan
As we move forward, we want to work more closely with you. For one thing, we’d like to get your feedback on our new draft business plan for advancing animal disease traceability. This is essentially an outline of the strategies we plan to implement as we work towards our ultimate goal of getting animal tracing information in our hands within 48 hours of a potential disease outbreak.
Our goal is to zero in on the areas where we can accomplish the most to reach critical mass—getting 70 percent of animals in a species identified and traceable to the premises of origin.
The draft business plan sets forth seven strategies:
- Prioritize species and sectors to improve traceability where we need it most
- Harmonize animal ID systems
- Converge NAIS data standards in disease programs and regulations
- Integrate automated data capture technologies with disease programs
- Partner with states, tribes and territories to support traceability infrastructure
- Collaborate with industry, and
- Advance identification technologies.
In the interest of time, I want to address just the first strategy—setting priorities to put our resources where they are most needed, where advances in traceability will offer the greatest return on investment.
Under our proposed business plan, highest priority goes to the primary commercial food animal sectors—cattle, poultry, swine, sheep and goats. We’ve also made the competition horse sector a high priority since it involves frequent animal movement. We are concerned here with the potential for a disease event of significant economic impact, the risk of disease to human health, tracebacks, economic value and the potential for disease to spread to other livestock species.
In addition, the draft plan includes subsets within the high priority categories. For example, beef and dairy breeding animals are the highest priorities within the cattle sector. The plan is intended to move us ahead as quickly as possible, focusing both on sectors where we can make progress quickly and those that are most critical for U.S. agriculture.
As we implement NAIS, we’re emphasizing first a bookend approach—the birth and harvest of livestock. So as vets who see animals at or near the end of their lives, you have a critical role to play in both identifying diseases and promoting traceability.
Veterinary Outreach Plan
We want to make it easy for you to help us—and we want to hear from you as we put NAIS in place. We are developing a packet of materials that we will provide to USDA-accredited veterinarians.
We’ll also provide them to states, the Academy and other veterinary associations. We’re still debating whether or not to do one version or separate versions for vets who focus on equines and those whose practice involves cattle.
The packet will include a number of items, such as:
- a discussion guide booklet—to assist you in initiating conversations with clients on NAIS and traceability
- frequently asked questions
- a PowerPoint template that you can use for client education meetings, and
- an NAIS brochure and brochure holder.
Once we’ve printed and mailed this information, we hope to keep in touch in other ways as new developments occur. We’ll send out email updates and case studies.
Building Markets
Obviously, the primary selling point for NAIS is that it will better enable us to safeguard animal health in the U.S. That’s the purpose first and foremost—protecting livestock and preserving the livelihoods of producers.
But there are other benefits as well that you may want to mention to the producers and livestock managers you work with. Knowing we can pinpoint problems and address them should a disease outbreak occur builds confidence in the health and wholesomeness of U.S. livestock. Further, the animal ID program enables us to meet the international obligations we face in the world market. Having the system in place will smooth the way for livestock exports.
We’re all aware of the concerns about BSE around the world. We’ve worked hard to demonstrate that we have the safeguards in place to ensure that the products we sell are safe and healthful to eat.
In May, the OIE—the World Organization for Animal Health—awarded the U.S. a formal classification of “controlled risk” for BSE. This is essentially an international clean bill of health for our national cattle herd. It’s a determination based on a scientific assessment of risk using internationally agreed upon standards. Trade partners that adopt OIE standards as their own standards for trade now have no scientific reason to block imports of U.S. beef—of any age.
We’ve taken the first steps to harmonize U.S. standards with OIE standards with the proposed minimal risk rule that we finalized September 14. This rule, which went into effect on November 19, expands the list of allowable beef imports from countries with minimal risk of BSE—based on a scientific risk assessment.
Canada is currently the only minimal-risk country. The Canadians also received a controlled risk classification from OIE in May.
Our next step is to amend all of our BSE-related import regulations to make them consistent with international guidelines. Our goal is to publish a “Comprehensive BSE” proposed rule by August of ’08.
All the while, we’ll be pushing our traditional trade partners who buy red meat to accept the OIE designation for the U.S. and restore or expand their markets.
Challenges
In closing, I just want to reiterate that USDA values your partnership with us and producers in safeguarding U.S. livestock. Your ability to identify diseases early and to work with us to halt their spread is invaluable.
Now we need your help in establishing participation in NAIS as a best practice throughout the livestock industry. Toward that end, I encourage you to:
- Familiarize yourself with NAIS data standards, and get a premises ID number as we begin to use them in disease programs
- Use—and encourage your clients to use—USDA NAIS-compliant “840” tags whenever possible
- Merge marketing with traceability—for age-source verification, process-verified, QSA programs
- Educate producers in your state on how advancing disease traceability now will help them in the event of a future disease event
- Encourage producers to participate in NAIS
- Get e-authentication for your practice so you can
- Participate in USDA’s electronic health certificate system
- Get access to veterinary accreditation modules for information
- Participate in NAIS as an AIN Tag Manager or AIN Tag Reseller—value-added professional service
In fact, you can sign up for e-authentication and premises registration at the APHIS booth here at the conference if you’d like. I encourage you to do that.
When it comes to NAIS, we would truly welcome all the help that you can give us to get this system firmly established throughout the U.S. Thank you for joining with us to help producers see the worth of NAIS and to help them understand the wisdom of registering their premises to protect their livelihoods as well as their neighbors’ herds.