The Australian Government has tightened controls on goods coming in from Germany after the recent discovery of foot and mouth disease in water buffalo earlier this month.
Import permits for more than 2000 products have been cancelled and passengers travelling from Germany and elsewhere will be monitored much more closely, Federal Government figures have said.
It comes after German authorities reported the country’s first outbreak of FMD in nearly 40 years in three dead water buffalo on a farm on the outskirts of Berlin.
It is understood the animals had initially been tested on suspicion of having been infected by Bluetongue disease, which has been spreading across Europe since 2023.
However an official notification from the World Organisation for Animal Health on Saturday confirmed FMD, not bluetongue, as the cause.
The last reported outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Germany occurred in Lower Saxony in 1988, and the last positive case in Europe was detected in Bulgaria in 2011.
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a serious and highly contagious animal disease that affects all cloven-hoofed animals including cattle, sheep, goats, camelids, deer and pigs.
Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry issued a statement to say it was working to assess the biosecurity risk to Australia and had tightened controls on impacted commodities.
This included on dairy, beef food items, reproductive material, veterinary therapeutics, pet food or stock feed, and laboratory goods manufactured or exported from Germany.
China this week announced it would prohibit imports of sheep, goat, poultry and even-toed ungulates from African, Asian and European countries due to outbreaks of livestock diseases such as sheep pox, goat pox and foot-and-mouth-disease.
The ban from the world’s-largest meat importer affects Ghana, Somalia, Qatar, Congo (DRC), Nigeria, and Tanzania, Egypt, Bulgaria, East Timor and Eritrea.
Australia’s livestock industry was sent into overdrive in 2022 after an outbreak of FMD in Indonesia, with biosecurity foot mats removed from airports last year after the outbreak “stabilised”.
An FMD outbreak in Australia would potentially cost the economy more than $80 million.
https://thewest.com.au/countryman/livestock/australian-government-tightens-controls-after-fmd-outbreak-in-germany–c-17532425
