Biosecurity Summit 2006

Push to manage more risk offshore

 
Thinking globally, acting locally was the theme for the fourth Biosecurity Summit, held in Wellington last month.

The summit opened with a karakia from George Ria of MAF followed by a welcome address from Jim Anderton, Minister of Agriculture and Minister for Biosecurity.

The Minister referred to the important role biosecurity plays in ensuring the success of our primary industries.

“The primary industries are vital to our economic well-being, and they are becoming more important. We need to keep them growing,” he said.

The Government is taking biosecurity seriously, with baseline spending increasing by more than 50 percent every year since 2000 (see sidebar). The focus of New Zealand’s biosecurity efforts is moving towards pre-emptive and preventative measures, rather than responding to risks when they are already here.

“I want to see us move more of our risk overseas, so that other countries and traders manage more biosecurity risks before they get to New Zealand.”

The Minister said while he welcomed progress, he also stressed realism, and could not promise a 100 percent incursion-free success rate.

“Even with unlimited resources we would not reduce the risk to zero,” he said. “With limited resources and unlimited threats, we need to direct our efforts to the most effective use of those resources.”

Murray Sherwin, MAF’s Director General, followed the Minister’s welcome with an opening address in which he talked about the impact of globalisation on New Zealand biosecurity.

“With today’s globalisation trends, risks are arriving faster and from more places,” he said. “Non-traditional sources of people and products are bringing non-traditional risks.”

Over the last decade, the pressure on our border has increased dramatically. The numbers of passengers, imported sea containers, used vehicles and machinery have doubled.

Murray Sherwin echoed the Minister’s comments on the impossibility of eliminating risk completely, and said risk reduction is the aim. He used the honey import health standard as an example.

“A huge amount of effort has gone into this. We’re not looking to eliminate the risk totally, but to get it down to the minimum, consistent with ongoing trade.”

He said there were a number of areas which need to change, going forward, including looking ahead at emerging risks, risk profiling and intelligence and a focus on behaviour change – using New Zealand’s “four million pairs of eyes and ears” to protect our natural advantage.

Surveillance, surveillance, surveillance!

 
The need for constant surveillance was a prevailing theme in Professor Ken Shortridge’s presentation to the 2006 Biosecurity Summit on what we can learn from avian influenza in Hong Kong.

In 2002, he retired from the Chair of Professor of Microbiology after 30 years at the University of Hong Kong. He began influenza virus studies in 1975 and confirmed that pandemic influenza is a zoonosis (an animal disease that can affect humans). In 1982, he developed the hypothesis that southern China is an epicentre for the emergence of pandemic influenza.

Professor Shortridge said, although pandemic influenza is now accepted as a non-eradicable zoonosis, it is possible to recognise incipient pandemics through virus surveillance, education and cooperation. He also stressed the importance of communicating science-based knowledge and maintaining transparency.

Not a nanny state

“It’s important to make information available to the public and make them aware of the difficulties but not be alarmist,” he said. “We must make the public responsible for themselves – this is not a nanny state.”

Professor Shortridge said the Hong Kong Government knew that a pandemic would eventually come from southern China well before the 1997 H5N1 (bird flu) outbreak occurred. Good interaction between the people of Hong Kong and their government played an important part in promoting awareness and education.

At the time of the 1997 outbreak, several decisions were made to improve communications, including recognising the importance of dealing the media and ensuring that all official work went through the Government.

“Confidence was key. It was important that people could see the Government doing a good job.”

Be prepared

Professor Shortridge stressed the need to be prepared, to have landfills ready for bird carcasses, to test for leachates, and to know where all poultry farms are.

“Know your enemy. Surveillance, surveillance, surveillance all the time. Do not give up.”

Regular surveillance ensured a 2001 outbreak was detected early. The virus was picked up during surveillance in markets before any humans had become sick or any birds had died.

“Bird flu is a political problem. We need to get the message across and get governments to react for the common good – of humans, animals and the planet,” Professor Shortridge said.

So where does New Zealand fit in? Professor Shortridge provided a scenario which was easy to envisage.

“It’s possible that a young man who has back-packed his way around Asia and come into contact with, say, a swan, could then travel to Invercargill and bring the virus with him.”

He believes we stand a chance of beating a pandemic, or at least keeping it at low levels as long as we are vigilant with surveillance and continue to communicate with the world.

“H5N1 is out there and it’s going to be around for a long, long time,” he said. “We’ve done our job when we’re out of a job, but I don’t think that will ever happen.”

New Zealand standards among world’s best

Michael Brooks from the Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand (PIANZ) spoke at the Summit on the role of PIANZ and the Egg Producers’ Federation in preparing for avian influenza.

Poultry makes up 36 percent of all meat consumed in New Zealand, and on average we eat 220 eggs per person each year. New Zealand is free from the three major avian diseases: Newcastle disease, avian influenza and infectious bursal disease.

“We are the only country in the world to be free of all three diseases and the industry works hard to maintain that freedom,” Michael said.

He also credited New Zealand’s biosecurity regime for helping to maintain this status, in particular the control of poultry movement and the fact that no raw meat or table eggs are allowed to be imported. He says biosecurity standards on New Zealand farms are recognised as being among the highest in the world.

The industry is working on a number of key issues to keep out disease, including ensuring prompt reporting and rapid response to any suspected incursions, active and passive surveillance, and industry training.

Avian influenza surveillance in New Zealand

Biosecurity New Zealand has conducted comprehensive avian influenza surveillance designed to confirm freedom from highly pathogenic virus and that chickens and turkeys are free of all forms of the virus. Surveys so far have demonstrated freedom from notifiable avian influenza viruses in chickens and migratory birds. Plans are to continue surveillance in commercial chickens and wild birds and to initiate surveillance in turkeys. All at-risk bird categories will have been surveyed within two years, and New Zealand may then be in a position to draft a freedom case based on survey results and risk assessments with respect to risk pathways and the world situation.

Climate change and biosecurity

 
Professor Alistair Woodward is a lead author for the fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released last year. Since that report was released, Professor Woodward says attitudes towards climate changed have definitely shifted.

Speaking at last month’s Biosecurity Summit, he said public interest has grown, politicians have accepted the science is now robust enough to justify action and the world’s business leaders have put climate change at the top of the list of the world’s serious environmental problems. Human-induced global warming has begun.

“We are now observing a rate of change that is unprecedented in this 5,000 year period,” Professor Woodward said. “Looking forward, temperatures will rise from between 1.4 to 5.8°C over the next 50 years.”

Although humans adapt well to environmental change, we only need to look at recent extreme weather events to see the effects climate change is already having. Thirty thousand people died in the European heat wave of 2003, and in 2005 Hurricane Katrina claimed the lives of 1300 people.

Climate change is altering our physical and biological world. Two-thirds of the North Sea’s fish species have shifted in both latitude and depth. Disease-causing organisms are also migrating.

It is this movement of diseases and their vectors which will affect biosecurity because climate change influences the distance which diseases and pathogens travel. This will result in an increased risk of outbreaks in susceptible populations.

“With a change in climate and trade over the next hundred years, New Zealand could become a high-risk area for dengue fever,” Professor Woodward warned.

He believes biosecurity plans must include climate change. Tackling increased rates of disease will depend on improvements in social conditions, environmental management and health care.

“The timeframe is a lot shorter than we thought,” he said. “Climate change requires us to think globally, act locally and act globally.”

Stopping the global ant trade

 
Ants are adept hitch hikers and colonisers and have been spreading internationally for hundreds of years.

So says Biosecurity New Zealand’s Simon O’Connor, who is currently on secondment to the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. Simon is tasked with coordinating and implementing the Pacific Ant Prevention Programme (PAPP). Simon was a presenter at last month’s Biosecurity Summit in Wellington.

“Ants can contaminate anything, anytime. Not just the usual sea containers, but their contents as well, from shoes to iPods,” Simon said. “They utilise every pathway known.”

The PAPP was established to try to stop ants spreading through the Pacific Islands in order to protect islanders’ livelihoods, lifestyles and biodiversity. The programme has a number of challenges, including preventing commodity contamination, detecting and reporting at the border, and identifying requirements with Pacific Island nations.

As a PAPP partner, Biosecurity New Zealand has conducted trials in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in which simple hygiene measures proved effective in preventing contamination at ports of origin.

“Sea containers are a difficult pathway, but they can be kept under control,” Simon said.

Fighting incursions can be a costly exercise. Australia has recently had three red imported fire ant (RIFA) incursions, and has spent $200 million on eradication attempts.

“New Zealand has had three incursions at a cost of five to ten million dollars so far, but there is always potential for more. Likely sources are the United States and Southeast Asia.”

The PAPP takes a regional approach to meet challenges head on, and has so far facilitated surveillance work in nine countries, specifically targeting RIFA. The effectiveness of the regional approach is reliant on support and commitment from New Zealand, Australia, the United States and all Pacific Island countries.

Future plans for the PAPP include obtaining full funding, increasing public awareness and institutionalising ant surveillance in the region. Vessel and port hygiene are two areas that also require additional focus.

“We need to lead by example and export our standards to the world,” Simon said.

He said some policy gaps regarding offshore treatment of sea containers need to be addressed, in particular the use of toxic bait in containers from China and the United States in an attempt to prevent RIFA contamination.

One of the biggest challenges the PAPP faces is to optimise ant surveillance efforts to minimise the risks of founding populations going undetected. A good example of this is the little fire ant (LFA) which has become impossible to eradicate in Tahiti, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu. There are emerging populations now in Papua New Guinea and Cairns, and because of the lag in detection, eradication is an unlikely or very expensive response option in many cases.

Simon repeated the unofficial mantra of the summit: “Surveillance, surveillance, surveillance. Early detection is critical.”

What didymo means to a hydro electricity generator

 
With storage lakes comprising 77 percent of the country’s hydro storage capacity, Meridian Energy Ltd showed an early interest in the discovery of didymo.

Dave Herrick, Meridian’s Natural Resources Adviser, told the Biosecurity Summit the didymo invasion has thrown up some major challenges to New Zealand since it was discovered in Southland’s lower Waiau River.

Didymo was found during a routine Meridian Energy survey of alga growth by NIWA and Southland Fish and Game staff, and has since been identified in several South Island rivers.

“Didymo is the biggest thing to hit New Zealand water in a long time,” Dave said. “It’s touched everyone with an interest in fresh water.”

Although New Zealand is now regarded as a world leader in didymo research, Dave believes there is a lot we still don’t know.

“There is uncertainty about the impact on our ecology, and short- and long-term management,” he said.

As a commercial operator reliant on New Zealand waterways, Meridian has been involved in the didymo debate and response from the outset. As part of their response, Meridian staff took part in a fact-finding trip to the United States. Some of the waterways they visited have been concrete lined so they can be drained regularly to prevent didymo from taking over.

Among the risks Meridian could face should didymo become widely established, are asset failure of canal intakes and pumps (at present the Tekapo canal produces two tonnes of didymo per day), unreliable grid stability and security of supply, and the loss of access to water.

These risks are being addressed in a number of ways, including extensive scientific and civil evaluations, operational risk and response planning (civil, electrical and environmental), and working to increase awareness.

As part of raising awareness, signage has been erected at many waterways reminding users that it is an offence to knowingly communicate or spread an unwanted organism. The signs ask fishers and boaties to check, clean and dry all equipment before moving between rivers in the South Island.

Decontamination stations are also being established, such as the one at Tekapo’s whitewater canoe course.

Dave said future challenges would include spending more money, continuing education and developing more of a community focus.

Page last updated: 30 April 2008