EP13 - Alistair Carmichael MP, Autumn Budget Review

So before we go into some...

So we just covered off the Bluetongue bit.

Yeah.

So our latest situation in GB is that case numbers are dropping dramatically.

I think Powerbright and APHA's delivery back to field has caught up.

There's no results backlog.

I want to plug that we at MBA are leading a group from industry to try and get some funding from England, Scotland and Wales to deliver a proper comms package over the winter so we don't end up in exactly the same place as we did this year.

The disease is in the west of our islands currently.

Our weather prevails west to east, so next year, I think, the disease will overwinter.

So, you know, we don't have much more of an update on that.

But what's your view, Alastair, on how to blue-turn things? Well, I

mean, the situation you described there is one that tells me that as long as the system isn't under pressure, then it works.

But what you saw this summer was that when the system was under pressure, it stopped working.

So the reporting on the outbreaks, where it was, how bad it was, that just wasn't functioning properly.

The availability of vaccine wasn't good enough.

The information that was available to farmers about the vaccine was virtually non-existent.

And we had missed a trick in terms of getting the comms out there to the industry.

So, as you know, Neil, my family farm is in the south east corner of Islay.

So we're only 12 miles across the North Channel from Northern Ireland.

So I vaccinated our cattle and our sheep last year.

August-September 25, and as the summer wore on and it became more apparent that actually this was going to be a thing this summer, I'm asking, and remember I'm married to a vet and I've got a son who's a vet, so I am asking Is the vaccine that we put into our cattle and our sheep last year a once-in-a-lifetime thing, or is that something that we're going to have to redo every year? The data sheets were silent on that.

So that was the level of detail that just wasn't available, that farmers really needed and couldn't get when they needed it.

You learn from your mistakes or you risk repeating them.

So I think what we need to have, and this does really probably need to come from government, from the APHA, from the department, from the Scottish Government, whoever it's going to be, um we need people to have it people to have this put in front of them right at the start of the year so you know into early spring before the temperatures start to rise and before the midges emerge again yeah so you know why is it died off well it died off because um the the midges of the the midges have gone um so i i speak with some um feeling on this because I was eventually told that we did need to redo all the stock.

It was early September before I was able to source any vaccine itself and it was the one that you had to do two doses of and it wasn't fully effective until the end, three weeks after the second dose which meant it wasn't going to be fully effective until the middle of October basically and even in Islay there's not many midges left in the middle of October so it's sitting in the fridge it'll come out in the spring and we'll do it then but that's the time that people need to be thinking about it if you wait until it's a problem then you've left it too late