UK 'not prepared' for severe animal disease outbreaks

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Farmer Preparing Injections for the Cattle

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Focus on diseases such as bird flu and outdated working practices meant Defra and APHA were underprepared for high risk diseases, warned MPs

The UK is “not adequately prepared” to deal with outbreaks of severe animal diseases, with a lack of resources and outdated processes leaving it potentially critically exposed to future threats, MPs have warned.

A focus on tackling immediate threats, such as avian flu and the bluetongue virus, had “diverted resources away from other work to prepare for future outbreaks”, warned a report by the Commons Public Accounts Committee, published today, titled ‘Resilience to Threats from Animal Disease’.

Defra and its Animal and Plant Health Agency’s focus on being in a “state of semi-permanent response to medium-severity outbreaks”, such as the above diseases, therefore meant it was lagging behind on work to prepare for future outbreaks and “updating specific control strategies for high-risk diseases”, the report noted.

“Surveillance work, or ‘eyes and ears on the ground’, is vital to help detect new and re-emerging disease threats quickly and stop their spread,” it added.

Faced with the most severe, or serious concurrent outbreaks, the government would find responding “extremely stretching”, the Committee warned, while funding-starved local authorities would also struggle to pick up any slack – with more than a quarter of local public services not “confident in their outbreak capabilities”.

“While local authorities have stepped up to provide extra resources during recent outbreaks, capacity to undertake business-as-usual activities such as visiting livestock markets has reduced over the last 15 years,” the report found. “Work on animal diseases is competing with other local authority priorities and statutory responsibilities where there is limited capacity and financial resource.”

The report highlighted illegally imported meat as a key threat to the nation’s biosecurity, adding to earlier concerns voiced by the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in September that border controls used to prevent new diseases were “insufficient to address the level of risk” of animal disease.

Biosecurity threat

PAC further noted the aging National Biosecurity Centre at Weybridge, which is critical to the management of threats from animal diseases, was in “poor condition”. While Defra had already announced a £2.8bn upgrade, it and APHA must also “manage significant interim risks of failure as facilities age”, the Committee warned.

Any major failure at Weybridge “could have potentially significant impacts on the UK”, it added. For example, APHA “may not be able to deliver its emergency response during an animal disease outbreak”.

Further modernisation was required in the working practices of APHA, MPs on the Committee urged, noting how paper-based systems within the agency remained “far too common”.

And despite £62.8m of additional funding for modernisation being pledged by the end of the decade, “APHA still cannot commit to being paperless by the end of this period”, the report noted.

The “nation’s ability to protect itself” was additionally jeopardised by APHA’s difficulty in recruiting and retaining vets, with PAC noting a vacancy rate of 15% in September, and the need for a veterinary workforce strategy in response.

There were also concerns about a lack of strategy on animal vaccine shortages, with PAC recommending a strategy should be developed over the coming year.

“The bill for the major foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001 ran into multiple billions for the public and private sector,” said PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP. “Serious animal disease outbreaks pose a severe threat to wildlife, and the farming sector, and in the case of zoonotic diseases, to human health,” he added.

“Our latest report should therefore be of the deepest concern to all of us. Hard work has been done to respond to the current outbreaks of bird flu and, amongst sheep and cattle, bluetongue virus. But the necessity for a semi-permanent response to these current outbreaks has pulled government away from vital preparations for future threats – which have to be treated as a matter of when, not if.”

Government needed “to act now to prepare a full strategy to ensure preparedness for such events in the future”, said the Conservative MP, who added the Committee was “looking forward to the results” of this year’s Exercise Pegasus and Exercise Aspen – two major rehearsals carried out by government to test preparedness for a zoonotic disease pandemic and a foot and mouth outbreak.

“The government must use these exercises to fully evaluate our nation’s preparedness, swiftly address the underlying factors driving the vet vacancy rate, and make sure it has eyes and ears on the ground to detect oncoming threats quickly,” Clifton-Brown insisted.

“Government has been strongly focused on the immediate-term threats – it must now develop the bandwidth to look to the long-term as well.”