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This article was published in 1980
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Brucellosis in the Field
J. Keogh, B.V.Sc., Director Brucellosis Eradication
I appreciate this invitation to open your seminar on Brucellosis in the Field and I am pleased that your executive has seen fit to spend a full day on this important subject, recognising as it does the importance and magnitude of this Campaign in New South Wales.
The Brucellosis Eradication Campaign, as has probably been said to you on previous occasions this week, is the largest disease eradication campaign ever undertaken by the Department of Agriculture in New South Wales and is probably the biggest campaign that will ever be undertaken in Australia. When one considers that it is a Campaign in which every cattle breeder will be involved and all other cattle owners and most landholders will be contacted as part of the campaign, its magnitude can be appreciated. In many cases the Campaign will be the first contact many of these people have had with the Department of Agriculture, and for some with the Veterinary Inspector, and this feature makes the Campaign unique in the Department's history.
When one considers that, following a lot of stops and starts, work on the programme really got underway in March 1977, we have come a long way. Prior to this, there had been small-scale efforts in the north but in three years much has been accomplished. A few statistics will illustrate this fact. Since the commencement of the Campaign cattle in 40,400 herds have been tested and approximately 3m breeders have been involved. In the eradication of the disease from these herds, 17m samples have been collected and processed through the laboratories and to December 1979 over 55,000 reactors had been detected. We have paid compensation on 52,500, a total of $3,090,000.
A special staff of 500 people have been specifically recruited and trained for the campaign, including Veterinary Officers, Laboratory Technologists and general staff for both field and laboratory aspects of the Campaign. This has been augmented by a large proportion of the Division's professional staff and in no small measure by the Veterinary Inspectors of the PP Board service, and to a lesser extent the Rangers of that service.
The recruitment and training of this force is in itself a daunting task, particularly when one considers that the personnel involved are constantly changing and well over 1,000 people are or were employed during the three year period.
The Campaign is, therefore, a major one and when one considers that it was organised with very little addition to the professional staff of the Division and virtually, by one person, it is a magnificent tribute to the efforts of the late Fred Evans. The logistics of recruitment and setting up the Campaign on a State basis was no mean feat and what he accomplished virtually single handed was no mean task.
It is also a successful operation. You are all well aware of the state of advancement in each of your districts and those areas which have achieved provisional freedom. We are hopeful that the stage will be reached by June where the whole of the D.V.O. Districts of Goulburn and Cumberland, most of D.V.O. Gunnedah, Albury and Hume P.P. Districts in the Wagga District and Corowa in the Narrandera District and perhaps Mudgee, will be added to the Provisionally Free area. So the state, instead of a 1984 target can look to a 1982 one, with a fair degree of confidence. Testing is now in progress in all P.P. Districts in the State and, as staff become available from elsewhere, a major effort will be concentrated in the Central West. The developing drought situation, however, is a possible impediment to our aims.
I would like, however, to emphasise the obvious viz. that with provisional freedom the eradication of brucellosis really commences and the Campaign will continue for some years with total eradication in mind.
When all herds in the Provisionally Free area reach the status of Confirmed Free, we can be more confident but, until this is achieved, there is a need for constant vigilance. Complacency at all levels has been cited as the major factor resulting in explosive breakdowns in U.S.A. and Canada when they were confident they had virtually achieved eradication. We can't afford to let Australia repeat that performance. We have to reorganise our thinking and approach to avoid this, but more later.
Funding has been agreed to 1984 but negotiations are current for its continuation after that date and this will help, I hope, to dispel what I regard as a false sense of security and achievement prevalent in many of the influential people concerned with the programme.
There are, of course, major constraints in organising such a Campaign within the framework of the Public Service and, with the size and this factor in mind, it is amazing that the Campaign got underway at all and one could expect to have many administrative supply problems. The Campaign, however, has steam-rolled ahead in spite of this, and this, I think, is a tribute to all concerned, to the permanent staff of the Department involved, to the special Departmental staff recruited and, last but not least, the effort made by the Veterinary Inspector service and in many cases, the Rangers of the P.P. Boards. I like to think of the operation as a team operation of the official veterinary service with the involvement of Veterinary Inspectors and Rangers considered part of their normal work. While I realise there are historic bars to acceptance of this concept, the Campaign must be considered a singular effort and the role of the Veterinary Inspectors and Rangers is essential and vital and indistinguishable from that of Departmental staff.
The Campaign has required a complete change of outlook for most involved. It has called upon people who were never involved in such situations previously to select, train and administer large and continuous intakes of lay staff. There has been a need to consider the disease control on each property in a far greater depth than that usually adopted in disease control situations. Up to the Brucellosis Campaign, most of our decisions were clear-cut. A disease was present, there was one way of eradicating it and owners seldom questioned the need for literally following every instruction. This campaign requires each property to be considered as a unit because the control of the disease on the property has serious, varying economic consequences and many shades of grey in the interpretation of the laboratory report into a field control programme. Generally we have adapted and changed magnificently.
When this paper was first mooted, it was suggested that I look on the problems associated with it. I am reluctant to do this, excepting that in a Campaign of this magnitude, there will be some problems, and the Campaign is a success anyway. I prefer to deal with our challenge for the future and there are a few areas that deserve comment and I think, serious consideration within your seminar discussions. The first of these is complacency which I have already mentioned.
As veterinarians there is a need to constantly develop our skills in dealing with this disease. Hardly a month goes by without some new epidemiological finding upsetting existing ideas and calling for a revision and reconsideration of approach. We need to be particularly aware of the effects of the disease on the cattle owner and understand his viewpoint of our actions. Apart from ourselves, there is a need to educate other members of the profession.
The second area of challenge is the assessment of the Campaign.
The Campaign strategy called for the setting up of a computer network and it was planned that this network would be the major recording process for assessment.
We were assured that computers, being wonderful things, required no great abilities on the input side, that the staff could easily learn how to feed and operate them and that they would virtually relieve everybody of any responsibility of compiling data. This, unfortunately, could not have been further from the truth and if ever the old computer adage of garbage in and garbage out was a reality, our system went very close to it.
In the hurly burly of setting up the campaign, we were concerned with getting the cattle bled, getting the results of the test, getting the results to the owner, removing reactors and getting on with the next test.
Manual recording systems which we used for years were adequate for day to day activity. The computer was functioning but little attention was paid to ensure that the details in the machine bore any relation to the true situation in the herd.
True enough we were severely handicapped by delays in installation of the computers and programmes but we completely underestimated the degree of accuracy and effort required to make them work. As a result, in spite of major efforts, by many people, particularly by David Rolfe, we do not have the system working sufficiently well that I am at all confident that the figures produced are any better than an indication of trends. This is not good enough, and it will be one of the major challenges of the coming months to make this system work.
As the final assessment of our efforts by the rest of the community associated with and paying for the Campaign is on this basis, it is essential that we do so.
The final area of challenge I would like to mention is again associated with quality of staff and is really defined by the concept of supervision. The basic field setup of a supervisor or Cattle Inspector organising the work and supervising the activities of two or three bleeding teams, over-sighted by Veterinary personnel, with some assistance from the supervising Cattle Inspector, has been a remarkably efficient organisation and has achieved a great deal. However, there is no doubt the calibre of the staff being recruited is diminishing. Our staff turn-over rate is increasing and the Campaign is losing the initial enthusiasm and zest that accompanied its early days. As a result, funny things are happening through, I feel, lack of supervision because under the present system the Veterinarian is stretched too far.
I think that a lot of the problems associated with the computer and increasingly a lot of problems in the field are the result of lack of day to day supervision, not enough sergeants, too few people in between the major and the private. We have also tended to use lay staff for basic tasks only and restrict their activities to those levels.
I think this is an attitude we will have to change rapidly as I see an urgent need for an increasing number of well trained, well-informed supervisory staff working much nearer to the Veterinarian than previously. We have made a start along this way with some of the computer reference officers but I see a wide range of activities than can be carried out by lay staff and relieving Veterinary personnel particularly Veterinary Inspectors, for more urgent and professional activities.
There are, of course, many other areas where developments of the Campaign will result in change. Some of these, for instance, publicity, is at present getting a closer scrutiny and, with the appointment of Carmel Shanahan, some things have already been accomplished. Certain aspects which will not be mentioned today will be carefully scrutinised in the coming months.
The programme we are operating at present is likely to continue on the triennial testing basis for some time. It was hoped that abattoir monitoring would replace much of the field testing, but the more information that is accumulated on the monitoring process, the more doubts there seems to be that abattoir monitoring on its own will be adequate. Certainly, abattoir monitoring is a 'spotter' but at this stage I am doubtful it will ever be able to replace triennial herd testing. Therefore, as each area reaches the provisionally free level, we should quickly reduce our staffing level to that which will enable re-testing to be spread over a 3 year programme Originally, some areas were scheduled to complete this in less than 2 years. This poses problems for the continuous employment of staff and in the present climate in the Public Service it would be very difficult to re-start a programme that had been terminated in the area 1 to 2 years previously.
Finally, I think my concern on the future of the programme is very similar to that of Dr. Fichtner, the Chief Veterinarian for Brucellosis Eradication in the U.S.A., when reviewing their programme after their breakdowns. He said:
'I wish I could say that the increased suspicion of infection, discovered through blood tests at slaughter and the milk ring test, is caused by an improved surveillance system and not because of increased infection, and that it is not important to reach 100 percent efficiency in detection methods ... but I can't.'
'I wish I could tell you that the increase in infected herds is simply the result of detecting existing foci of infection and that Brucellosis is not spreading faster than we are finding it ... but I can't.'
'I wish I could tell you that attention to program details wasn't important; that success could be attained by test and slaughter alone ... but it won't be.''
'I wish I could tell you that the disease will go away once it reaches a certain low level of infection ... but it won't.'
'I wish I could tell you that additional resources are easy to obtain and that increased funding alone will cure much of the ills in the program ... but I can't.
'I wish I could tell you that the minimum standards of the Uniform Methods and Rules can be compromised, ignored and given only lip service and we will still make progress ... but I can't.
'I wish I could tell you that you need not be committed to this effort to make it succeed, that you don't have to solve your individual people problems because they will go away ... but they won't.
'I can promise you, however, that unless we act forthrightly to solve our problems regarding resources, spread of disease, inadequate surveillance and lack of epidemiology, then the spiral of compromise, non-concern, program interruption, increased infection rates, increasing undulant fever, lack of producer confidence, and more compromise will lead us to defeat in the eradication effort.'
I hope this concern never becomes factual.
I am sure that the spirit and enthusiasm of all associated with the Campaign in New South Wales will continue and I am sure that we will meet the challenge of the future and achieve success of total eradication.