Bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV) may not feature in the public's lexicon of animal ailments but it costs Irish farmers more than €100 million each year and a new programme devised by Animal Health Ireland (AHI) is set to eradicate it completely from the island by the end of the decade.

AHI is a not-for-profit organisation established as a private public partnership in 2009 with the mandate to provide leadership at national level for non-regulated diseases with the goals of enhancing the profitability and sustainability of individual livestock farms, enhancing the profitability of the food processing industry and enhancing the quality, image and competitiveness of Irish livestock and food in the marketplace.

The idea to develop a BVDV eradication programme came about shortly after AHI's foundation, according to communications manager Grainne Dwyer.

“One of our first jobs was to determine the priority issues for farmers and the industry. We couldn’t believe it when BVDV came out on top and that both farmers and industry wanted to see it controlled first.” Eradication of the disease has been identified as being very important in meeting the country’s targets for agriculture under the Food Harvest 2020 programme.

With cross-border trade accounting for a significant proportion of the cattle sector, this disease had to be tackled on both sides of the border. AHI worked closley withi its sister organisation North of the border, Animal Health and Welfare NI (AWHNI). Programme management was shared between the two organisations.

The disease is passed onto calves while in the womb. The AHI programme involves a cost effective laboratory test of the sample of skin from the calf’s ear which is produced as a result of them being tagged. If a sample comes back positive the farmer waits three weeks and has the animal retested to make sure it is a PI and then takes appropriate action.

The programme was piloted on a voluntary basis in 2012 and was proven to be successful. “We had to make sure that the labs could cope with the demand for tests before rolling out the compulsory programme in 2013,” Dwyer points out. “We have had a compliance rate of more than 99 per cent and we are already seeing a reduction in the number of PI calves born this year. The plan is to get rid of PIs over three years and have the disease eradicated by the end of the decade.”

- Barry McCall