Australia - Cattle council unfazed by FMD vaccine storage

Published: October 14, 2004

Source : ABC Net

The Cattle Council of Australia is not worried vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) will not be kept in the country. An agreement has been negotiated for the supply of half a million FMD antigen doses, with international animal health company Merian. Deputy director Michael Hartmann says he is not concerned it will take seven days to get the vaccine flown over from Europe, if an outbreak occurs. "You can't have bottles of vaccines sitting there ready to go because it has a shelf life," he said. "So regardless of where we wanted it, even if we had it in this country, it would still be probably a similar sort of period of time required to get the vaccine ready to put into the needles. "We have a standing policy that we don't want to have any of that material in this country because it may compromise people's belief that we are free of foot-and-mouth disease."

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