Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry handed over 500,000 lumpy skin disease (LSD) vaccines to the Ministry of Agriculture on Monday, 8 January 2024.
With the arrival of the latest shipment, Australia has provided a total of one million doses of LSD vaccine to Indonesia during the past year. This brings Australia’s total donation from 2022 to 2024 to 1.435 million vaccine doses to support the Ministry’s effort in controlling LSD in Indonesia.
Indonesia’s Chief Veterinary Officer and Director of Animal Health at the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr Nuryani Zainuddin, said control of LSD in the region was a shared priority.
“LSD and foot-and-mouth disease present significant biosecurity threats,” Dr Nuryani said.
“As a result, it is imperative that we continue to build on progress so far towards getting these outbreaks under control. We thank Australia for its ongoing biosecurity cooperation with Indonesia and for this latest donation of vaccines.”
Agriculture Counsellor at the Australian Embassy, Dane Roberts, said he was pleased to see the vaccines donated by Australia were helping.
“Over the course of the past year, Australia has supplied one million vaccines to our neighbours here in Indonesia – vaccines that are now finding their way into Indonesia’s cattle population and protecting farmers’ livelihoods,” said Mr Roberts.
“Australia remains free from LSD. Given the close and mutually beneficial trade between Australia and Indonesia in beef and live cattle, it’s vital that we work together to combat these biosecurity challenges in our region and protect our livestock industries.”
LSD is spread by mosquitos, biting flies and ticks, and severely affects cattle and water buffalo.
It affects milk production and produces sores all over the bodies of infected animals.
Source: Australian Embassy, Indonesia. For more information, visit Lumpy skin disease – DAFF (agriculture.gov.au).
Amazing to see the vets and bureaucrats going gung ho full steam ahead with vaccines without even assessing what nutritional deficiencies these poor cattle and buffalo are suffering from which makes them prone to lumpy skin disorder. It is about time our two governments got their beef nutrition specialists together to sort out this issue before wasting resources and contaminating the meat with toxic vaccines. It would be a cheap exercise to send a nutritionist to indonesia to collect blood, urine and dung samples from affected cattle, as well as pasture and soil samples that could be sent a laboratory in Australia for analysis. These samples could be compared to healthy animals in Australian conditions, as we already do on our own farms. The analysis would show the nutritional deficiencies or excesses as compared to healthy animals, thereby allowing us to treat the affected animals with minerals, protein or energy supplements to correct the problem. I have lost track of the number of times I have pleaded this case in the past year. However, MLA, Cattle Australia and the Albanese govt all continue to ignore common sense because the vets and big pharma are running biosecurity and they want to push drugs and vaccines. It seems the new Cattle Australia may need a new board already as they have not got the intelligence to work issues through and MLA needs a new leader to guide them towards common sense as well.