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The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is recommending that cattle producers refamiliarize themselves with biosecurity plans ahead of any detection of New World Screwworm and we caught up with Sigrid Johannes with NCBA to learn more.
Johannes said, “From a preparation standpoint, is just familiarize yourself with your state animal health official’s resources on anything about movement requirements, but also just basic biosecurity. I think one thing that we’ve seen really heavily in the cattle industry over the last couple of years, but even looking more broadly to our folks in poultry or in the hog business, biosecurity is everything. And animal movement is usually the number one thing that spreads a disease or a parasite or a pest from one place to another. So with screw worm, it’s no different. We’re not dealing with an infectious disease like FMD or something like that, but biosecurity does still matter.”
“Your state animal health official might provide some of these resources, or you can always go to screwworm.gov, which is the federal website, and start clicking through some of the links there. But some of the things that were included in the playbook documents that got released last week, these updated versions, is guidance on what to do with manure on your place. If you suspect you have a screwworm case, what to do with soil, you know, that might be around the vicinity of where an animal with a suspect case was. What do you look for? How do you visually inspect cattle when you’re checking them to make sure you’re not missing, you know, one of these small wounds that can end up turning into a massive screwworm problem,” said Johannes.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet