Canada has closed its borders to animals and meat products from Great Britain after foot-and-mouth disease was discovered on two farms Aug. 3.
About 570 animals have been killed as a quarantine precaution. No other disease incidents have occurred since and British officials are optimistic the problem has been contained.
Canadian producers need to be vigilant about who visits their farms to ensure no infectious diseases are introduced, said an epidemiologist with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
“Producers have a big responsibility also to make sure they know who comes on their farms and they don’t have unnecessary visitors,” said Caroline Dube.
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After the announcement, Canadian officials did a rapid traceback on any British products that may have entered the country. The only product discovered was some frozen bull semen, which later cleared as safe.
Any imported meat from susceptible animals must be cooked and hermetically sealed. No live animals are imported from the United Kingdom due to BSE restrictions.
Travellers coming from the U.K. must declare all food, animals and animal products that could carry the virus. The department of foreign affairs and international trade also issued a travel advisory reminding travellers from the U.K. to notify customs officials if they have visited a farm while abroad and if they plan to soon visit one in Canada.
Canadian health officials are also watching the British investigation into two laboratories at Pirbright near the farm where the disease was found. One facility is a government world reference laboratory for foot-and-mouth, which tests and catalogues strains of the disease from all over the world. The other facility is the private pharmaceutical company Merial Animal Health, which makes vaccines.
“We will be really interested in the outcomes of the investigations,” Dube said.
Labs here will be reassessed to make sure there are no breaches in biosecurity. The Level 3 CFIA lab in Winnipeg has a small amount of the virus contained for research purposes.
There is no vaccine production in North America. A frozen concentrate of a vaccine is stored on an island in the United States but it must be further processed to become a viable vaccine.
“If we have an outbreak, this bank of vaccine is shared by Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. It gets activated and those concentrates are sent to Europe to get reformulated into vaccine and then they are sent back,” Dube said.
The last foot-and-mouth epidemic in Great Britain in 2001 resulted in losses of $17 billion US in culled livestock and tourism revenue.
