NZ scientist key in fight against foot-and-mouth plague

By CARROLL du CHATEAU

The British foot-and-mouth crisis devastating everything from British farming to tourism, football matches and even Tony Blair's election plans, could have been checked if Britain had been as well prepared as New Zealand.

The British have a state-of-the-art New Zealand-developed computerised animal and disease tracking method. But, as Professor Roger Morris of Massey University says, "they simply didn't have their data organised. They're certainly not as well organised as we are here."

Instead, a crisis team dispatched from Palmerston North to England days after the outbreak, came to the rescue and fired up the British system in four days.

"We were first on the spot to help," says Morris. "The data we've put together is not perfect, there were a lot of short cuts, but we got them [the Brits] up and running ... "

So how does a New Zealand veterinary epidemiologist get into the middle of Britain's foot-and-mouth outbreak? Probably because his system, which was designed to protect New Zealand agriculture a decade ago, is the best in the world. A copy was sold to Britain in 1998.

Its ability to foresee what will happen when various methods of control are used is now at the centre of the debates raging in Britain about the relative merits of vaccinating healthy animals or slaughtering them and about burning carcasses rather than burying them.

"We've been working round the clock for the last three days, looking at how long the epidemic will last if they take various different strategies," says Morris.

"Now they're moving to additional measures - bringing in the Army and killing out infected farms within 24 hours and all farms within a 1.5km radius within 48 hours. [With this approach] our model shows very encouraging results, a shorter and much smaller epidemic."

A world-acclaimed specialist in the spread of animal disease, Morris says the beauty of his system, known as EpiMAN and which cost between $2 million and $3 million to develop, is that it sets priorities at the start of an outbreak, when people are still overwhelmed.

"It tells you which farms are likely to get infected, both from animal movements and wind-borne spread ... It also, by charting the two to five-day incubation period, has very clever ways of anticipating when animals will get sick, so we know when to send vets out to various farms.

"It tracks the movement of animals, so we know which farms should be visited, and takes into account the fact that the disease can be spread up to 50km on wind from infected pig farms to cattle."

And no, the British epidemic, which had reached more than 900 farms and caused the slaughter of 587,000 animals at the time of writing, has not peaked yet. "That will probably happen about two weeks from now."

Morris has fielded crisis calls from Britain before. One came on a Sunday night in February 1996 when the human version of mad cow disease was first discovered.

"The first confirmed group of cases of variant CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease] had just been diagnosed," he explains. "Could we help with a program to track its path?"

For some time British authorities had been perplexed by the development of BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the so-called mad cow disease. But what now had the British public rattled was the clear evidence that BSE had jumped the species barrier, through a type of protein known as a prion, to seed the human brain-destroying condition, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, in people who ate beef from affected cattle.

The possibility of a huge and potentially devastating epidemic that, because of the long incubation period of the CJD prion, could last 30 years had the British Government running for cover.

For Morris, who had been based at Massey University in Palmerston North for 15 years, during which research money had become continually tighter, there was another drawcard. "They [the Veterinary Laboratories Agency] had a $3 million budget from the British Government."

What was supposed to be a three-month "helping out" project turned into a five-year research programme using both tried and trusted methods formulated for EpiMAN plus new ideas to track both forward, to new outbreaks, and backwards, to BSE's beginnings.

Within two years the Massey team had mapped all 15 million cows in the United Kingdom to their farms, including every one of the around 200,000 cases of BSE-infected animals the country had produced.

"We do advance computer analysis, analysing patterns of the disease, looking at what happened over the years of the epidemic ... Obviously they're [Britain's BSE-infected cows] all well and truly dead now," says Morris. "But we needed that information to see how the disease had spread."

Surprisingly, the system led the BSE detectives to south-west England, between Hampshire and Somerset, in the 1970s, rather than, as is popularly thought, to British sheep infected with scrapie in the 1980s.

"I think our data is very convincing," says Morris, who now believes that the link between sheep scrapie and BSE is "quite unlikely."

"This is not guessing. I've examined 35 different explanations of where BSE came from and the most likely is that a wildlife species exotic to Britain, due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances, got into meat and bonemeal fed to cattle and started the problem."

Morris' take on why Europe has been plagued by diseases in livestock goes hard against the commonly held view that natural grass eaters develop problems when they are fed meal made from ground bone and carcasses from same-species animals.

"It's neat, but it doesn't mesh with the data," he says. "It is simply not true. Meat and bonemeal have been fed to animals for more than 100 years without any problems - until the BSE prion dropped into bonemeal in the 1970s."

On the other hand, now that BSE is so widespread Britain's 1988 ban on feeding cattle meat and bonemeal and so spreading the disease further, is obviously vital. Already Britain has reduced risk to cattle by more than 90 per cent.

New Zealand, which does not have BSE, has not allowed the importation of meat and bonemeal since the early 1950s and banned them being fed to cattle entirely from January 2000.

So what is causing the disease outbreaks plaguing European farmers?

According to Morris - and he has a 44-page curriculum vitae on which to base his opinion - both BSE and foot and mouth stem from the exponential increase in the movement of people, animals and animal products throughout the world.

"It was animals from outside the UK that got into the bonemeal and started BSE," he says. "Just like Aids was almost certainly a wildlife disease that crossed to man in Africa because of unusual contact between man and animals."

According to Morris and his mighty computerised tracing process, the latest foot-and-mouth virus also got into British farm animals through illegally imported raw food that was then passed on to pigs. It was not caused by pig stalls, factory farming or any of the other farming practices so detested by the Greens and instinctively repugnant to the rest of us.

"What can make outbreaks more noticeable is the fact that herd sizes have increased, so epidemics are bigger," says Morris.

Morris also disputes the theory that animals are worse off on modern farms.

"As a vet I'd say the animals I see in Asia, where they use traditional farming practices, are far less healthy. If I was choosing, I would far rather be a pig in New Zealand than a cow in Asia.

"Not that modern farming systems are perfect," he continues. "Problems have emerged that we need to have a look at. But overall methods are a long way better than they were 40 years ago when in Britain they used to have foot and mouth constantly."

The Melbourne-born vet's educational qualifications are outstanding. He has a PhD (his thesis was on the use of computer modelling in epidemiological and economic studies of animal disease), a master's degree in veterinary science (his thesis was on the economics of bovine mastitis control systems) and honours papers in pure mathematics, computer science and ecological systems analysis.

Now 57, with a career that spans university teaching posts in Melbourne and the United States - where he headed the department of clinical and population sciences (veterinary) at the University of Minnesota - practical vet work (mainly with pigs and cattle), agricultural economics and computer science, Morris is part animal welfare expert, part lateral thinker, part marketer, part systems man.

One of his first software systems, PigCHAMP which he developed at Minnesota in the 1980s, made the university $30 million. Now the Massey team has developed a more sophisticated version called PigWIN, plus its cow equivalent, DairyWIN. They operate from PCs and palm pilots so farmers can input data while they're walking round their farms looking at their animals.

"Soon we'll have voice entry as well," says Morris. "Farmers don't like keyboards.

"The material downloads into the PC in the farmhouse, then up via the web, to a national database. This way we can help farmers track diseases and growth and make genetic improvements to their stock."

Another Morris project centres round TB control in possums - a major problem for farmers, because they infect cattle.

First he established that possums were most infectious during the last six weeks of their lives, as they staggered around, causing curious cattle to come up and nose them. Second, he established that sick possums slept in hotspots, typically pieces of scrubby bush, during the day.

The team developed a satellite system that showed up hotspots "then we got farmers to keep cattle out of them in winter and summer, when the possums are most infectious, and to poison the possums in spring and autumn."

And the king hit? A self-vaccination system that is two-thirds of the way through the research system. "Basically possums, lured by a cinnamon scent, puff themselves in the face with an aerosol vaccine."

Morris believes there is a major international market for this research.

"It's not limited to possums and TB. There are badger problems in Britain and Ireland, rabies in North America. It could also be used for things like vaccinating deer."

Then there is his work in parts of Asia and Africa, where the team's system for parasite and disease control has cut young cattle deaths by two-thirds.

Morris is obviously hard-headed. His chair at Massey is funded by international pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough. More interestingly he took it - and the move to Palmerston North - over a job offer to be Chief Veterinary Officer of Australia 15 years ago, and is still here.

Why? "Because with this job I could chose what I wanted to do for the benefit of New Zealand agriculture." I can almost hear him smiling down the phone.

"I had three choices - stay in the US and become an American, as you do after you've been there five years, become chief vet of Australia, or take the chair in New Zealand."

Although the Massey job was initially offered for five years, Morris is still going strong. His team of three has developed into a research group of between 60 and 70.

The appointment has improved New Zealand's international reputation in animal infectious disease control, our chances of keeping animal diseases out of the country and the ability to knock outbreaks on the head within weeks.

Although our Government cut back heavily on such research during the 90s, Morris is pleased that last month, prompted by the European epidemic, it took some "very serious steps to enhance border surveillance and publish information about animal disease risk. We've also got to raise disease surveillance so that we can detect diseases if they occur."

It is very unlikely, given that the foot and mouth virus can last for a few minutes to a few hours, that it will get in on someone's shoes - unless that is, they're caked in mud and manure.

The real danger, stresses Morris, is raw meat products from Asia, probably brought in illegally, getting into the animal feed chain.

"In the last six months 12,000 food items have been seized at the border. It's frightening."

The strain, both of working from 5 am until 8 pm most days for weeks now and of the politics spilling over to Palmerston North from a devastated Britain, is exhausting.

Last week, on the off-chance that foot and mouth could turn up on a New Zealand farm at any time, Morris and his team put EpiMAN through its paces using the hypothetical outbreak of a virulent poultry disease in Pukekohe.

Like foot and mouth the disease can travel by air. And Morris, charting its progress from Wallaceville in the Hutt Valley, enjoyed himself, watching the big computer estimate which poultry farms would get the disease and when; how many fowl would have to be destroyed to bring the outbreak under control; whether vaccination would work; and, most importantly, how to stop the epidemic spreading.

"New Zealand put money into this work initially," he says, "but a lot of funding in recent years has come from overseas."

Altogether Morris' department brings in around $1.5 million of research funds annually, making it one of the biggest research groups in New Zealand.

He is also constantly looking for ways to boost the group's income by selling software to other countries. The going price for EpiMAN is hundreds of thousands of dollars a copy. And, given the situation in Europe, it is likely he is on to a winner.

"I'm in negotiation with a range of countries," he says. "There's an e-mail on my desk from one country, I've just had the Irish on the phone."

Herald Online feature: Foot-and-mouth disaster

World organisation for animal health

UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food

The European Commission for the Control of Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Pig Health/Foot and Mouth feature

Virus databases online