Mitigating Disasters affecting the Livestock Industry

The following material is from "Animal Management in Disasters", Heath SE., Mosby, 1999

There are several unique issues that arise in disasters for the livestock industry. This should not make the livestock industry exempt from all hazards planning, rather it needs to apply sound principles of disaster management to the protection and strengthening of the industry. In the following an attempt will be made to exemplify how the principles of emergency management can be applied to three major disasters that threaten the livestock industry: food safety, contagious disease, and waste handling. 

Historically the greatest concern for food safety in disasters has been the contamination of meat and milk following radio nucleotide fallout. The origins of this interest go back to the cold war era and the development of nuclear power in the US. A resurgence of interest in countries other than the US occurred after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident. This resulted in an international incident where meat and milk of many species through the world became contaminated from nuclear fallout.

In the US the interest in radio nucleotide contamination of the food supply was at its peak throughout the early 1950’s to 1970’s. Then, extensive funding supported what must be considered some of the most horrific research ever conducted by veterinarians and other scientists on animals.

It is regrettable that despite a great deal of knowledge that was generated on the effects of radiation on the development of clinical signs, patho physiology, pathology, and distribution of radio nucleotides in meat and milk, there has been very little funding or research to support mitigation and preparedness programs beyond printing and distributing literature on disease processes. As such the interest in radio nucleotide contamination of meat and milk is a classic example of science developing programs on how to get the missiles into the air, while overlooking that the missiles also have to land somewhere.

In contrast to radio nucleotide food contamination, frequent reports in the national media on food safety concerns arising from meat and milk contaminated with bacteria (E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella spp., listeriosis), these outbreaks are rarely thought of as disasters. When contamination of processed food occurs on a large scale, protection of the livestock industry would be improved if the public were drawn into discussions of the acceptance of contaminated food, public perception of animal welfare, methods for disposal of large numbers of contaminated carcasses and food. Any incident involving large scale food contamination should be addressed by reviewing the infrastructure needed to supply alternative feeds, indemnity programs, and open discussions between producers and consumers.

Expertise to deal with food safety disasters are available. However, this expertise is likely only to be functionally integrated if food safety is considered another type of disaster, complete with an emergency management cycle of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Without this recognition our nation’s ability to deal with food safety, especially radio nucleotide contamination remains an example of a vicious "destruction - repair cycle" that progressively undermines confidence in the safety of our nation’s food supply.

Reinforcing this lack of credibility is the current structure by which an efficient response to extraordinary events is expected of agencies and groups that have little to no every day experience with the common and likely issues that will arise in disasters. Rather, the groups that have a vested interest in the outcome of any disaster, such as consumers, media, producers, veterinarians, researchers, that have that experience have only rarely been brought into the planning phases of food safety disasters. Experience has shown in many other types of disasters that without comprehensive input an efficient disaster response cannot be expected.

Effective mitigation programs are team efforts. These programs only work if there is leadership by the agencies that deal with livestock producers on a daily basis, and there is buy in by livestock producers. Only agencies that have a good rapport with producers on a daily basis are likely to get their cooperation for the development of practical mitigation and preparedness programs.

Currently most mitigation and preparedness measures for the prevention of radio nucleotide contamination of human food are under the direction of the Department of Health. However, the Department of Health rarely deals with animals or producers per se, and are therefore, unlikely to be able to make practical recommendations on how to protect livestock and other animals following a nuclear accident. With this in mind it is predictable that there will be low compliance with recommendations in the event of a disaster.

The issues that determine compliance are likely to be the same as those that arise in other types of disasters: Animal owners will not evacuate without their animals, and animal owners who evacuate or are forced to evacuate without their animals, are likely to attempt to rescue them. Both of these are particularly true for livestock owners, as the commitment of farmers to their animals in general is usually much higher than that of pet owners.

For mitigation and preparedness programs to be effective they must be developed in the context of every day occurrences. Therefore, an all hazards approach should be adopted. Examples include on farm consultations on where to move animals to, where they would be safe from all types of disaster, including nuclear accidents.

All hazards disaster preparedness is the best approach to reduce the impact of specific disasters, such as nuclear. Methods to improve compliance are to educate the producers and to incorporate them in the planning process. There are many other established emergency management methods that can be applied to this approach. These are described throughout this book.

Public perception is created in the early phases of disaster response, when interest and attention is highest, however, the impacts of last well into the recovery period. The long term damages that could affect the livestock industry are a lack of consumer confidence in the wholesomeness of food of animal origin. The spread of misperceptions about the wholesomeness of food of animal origin must be immediately addressed in disasters, especially nuclear accidents, through active reputation management programs.

Compliance

The factors that will determine the effectiveness of a response to a nuclear accident are compliance and public perception. The same applies to other types of food safety disasters.

In no other type of disaster will there be as much control exerted over the response phase as after a nuclear accident. Virtually every aspect of response has a been addressed by regulatory agencies, and it is clear that these authorities will not allow uninitiated persons to enter potentially or known contaminated sites. However, there is one major aspect of response that authorities appear to have overlooked, which is the behavior of animal owners, especially farmers, i.e., compliance.

The evacuation of dairy cows is not such a great problem as people may envisage. One study at the University of Tennessee indicated that 5,000 cows can be safely evacuated within 20 hours. The same study, however, indicated that dairy farmers who were flooded will not leave their animals. Similar information is available on beef ranchers. Farmers have consistently demonstrated low confidence in official who recommend that farmers should evacuate their farm. Even after farmers were flooded they indicated that they would prefer to rely on their own judgment than on officials if the decision to evacuate were to arise in further. Another likely problem that would occur in response to a forced evacuation without animals is that farmers would attempt to rescue or at least provide food and water for their animals.

If emergency management planning has been a community effort involving all stake holders in the industry, evacuation routes have been planned and agreed upon and are regularly used in drills, and family disaster preparedness and business resumption plans have been developed, evacuations are not likely to be as great of a concern. However, at the present time one can expect the top down authoritative approach to result in low compliance, a low level of public confidence in authorities, and long term detrimental impacts on the public’s perception of the wholesomeness of meat, milk and eggs as part of our regular diet.

Public perception

The potential for detrimental impact on public perception of food safety is high. Similar to other food safety concerns, the American public can only be assumed to have a zero tolerance expectation for food contamination by radio nucleotides. It is highly unlikely that consumers will accept any food that originated from animals that were exposed to radio nucleotides, rather they are most likely to assume that most food in contaminated. This expectation is clearly undermined and antagonized by government programs that develop food safety models based on radio nucleotide half lives.

Perhaps the largest impact on the livestock industry is public perception. Another relatively common example of the need to address public and media perception of food safety are outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis in drinking water. These are frequently attributed to contamination of the water from animal manure. However, most cases of water borne cryptosporidiosis are the result of faulty water sanitation systems. Nevertheless the first impression is often the one that sticks and the livestock industry may find itself defending itself against attacks it is not responsible for.

The potential to rebuild an industry or farm after a major disaster depends on the extent of the damage, the indemnity programs in place to finance rebuilding, the degree to which damaged reputation (public perception) needs to be restored. Effective recovery from a disaster is only possible if appropriate mitigation and preparedness programs have been implemented before a disaster strikes. Therefore, again, an all hazards approach is the most likely to provide the best approach to specific types of disasters, e.g., a nuclear accident.

Disaster mitigation that enhances recovery includes appropriate construction of buildings to withstand high winds, floods and are sufficiently large to house all animals, having areas on the farm where grazing animals can be moved to safely (elevations against floods, wooded areas against hail, depressions against high winds).

Farmers should also consider spreading out their businesses. This relatively easy for parts of the poultry, swine and beef industry, where producers can raise animals in several different areas of the US. By spreading farms out geographically the impact of any one disaster has a decreased overall impact on the whole enterprise.

Recovery from animal loss is mitigated all the same way as having appropriate insurance coverage, or better, by having designed a farm with protection of animals and income against large scale disasters. Insurance can be addressed by individual producers of reach of their farms. Indemnity programs can be addressed by farmer cooperatives and industry groups where species may not be insurable or it is more cost effective to develop program by the industry itself. An example of this is the "Poultry Indemnity for Delmarva" (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia). In this plan industry has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding between the poultry industry and Departments of Agriculture that spells out how the industry would be compensated if a large scale disease outbreak were to occur and millions of birds would need to be slaughtered. (Copies of this MoU are available from the MD State Veterinarians Office).

Large scale outbreaks of diseases are the quintessential disasters. Epidemics result in mass mortality of animals, devastating economic impacts on industries and communities, and they are often not confined by political boundaries. Diseases of livestock and poultry can be costly as they infect other animals or humans. The costs of diseases are due to loss of production, loss of animals, human morbidity, days of lost work and legal actions. The livestock and poultry industry is especially threatened by trans boundary (foreign animal) diseases, and epizootics of indigenous diseases, some of which are regulated.

Factors that contribute to the emergence of disease are increased movement and mixing of susceptible and infected populations of cattle (mixing of cattle from across North America at feedlots, classical Swine Fever outbreaks in several European countries), disruption of the environment (decreased availability of wetlands associated with outbreaks of fowl cholera, Newcastle disease and duck plague), crossing of agents to new species (equine Morbilli virus from bats to humans and horses, Mycoplasma gallisepticum spread from chickens to house finches), and changes in husbandry and management (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy).

Mitigation

The reintroduction of trans boundary diseases to the US is simply a matter of time. The likely threats are from tourism and bio terrorism. Effective mitigation goes to the root of the problem, rather than prepare for a response. This is a very different approach to the threat of trans boundary disease taken by USDA-APHIS-VS, which is principally a disaster response agency.

There is a common misperception that diseases in other countries only threaten the US livestock agriculture. These diseases threaten all countries in the world. As such they must be addressed as global problems. The most effective mitigation against trans boundary diseases is to support the development of the veterinary profession in developing countries to a point where these countries can collect appropriate information on diseases that can be used to eradicate these diseases.

Preparedness

Educational programs that alert producers to the risk of epizootic and trans boundary diseases should be developed that are based on epidemiologic data. In addition producers need to be educated and their confidence built up that if they suspect a trans boundary disease problem they know who to call without being chastised for acting responsibly. There are two approaches to successful preparedness.

Recent experience from Holland has shown that the rate of spread of a trans boundary disease is phenomenal. In the 24 hours between the diagnosis and the implementation of quarantine, many farmers in the surrounding areas disseminated animals from their herds. As a result many of the herds that eventually became infected were herds that had received animals from herds located in the initial quarantine area. The effect was that control measures were initially ineffective, the cost of intervention escalated, and many more pigs needed to be slaughtered. Clearly a large extent of the outbreak was attributable to spread by the farmers themselves. This can only be prevented by appropriately targeted education.

Recovery

The degree to which recovery will be successful will be determined by the extent to which the disease kills animals on a farm, and the scope of a business resumption plan. Business resumption and claims against insurance or disaster relief will probably only be supported if the producer can provide adequate records of past performance. Business resumption for farms includes diversifying into production of other crops (arable), producing products that are in high demand, tightening control on production (selling or slaughtering poor performing animals), and regular and frequent discussions with financial advisors.

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Manure handling facilities and lagoons present significant threat to the environment and wildlife. There are many regulations that govern the correct construction of manure storage facilities and their use. These regulations apply regardless of whether violations are the result of disasters or not.

Examples of violations are:

• Runoff that is not contained and overflows after heavy rain or snow melt;

• Use of stacked manure as a barrier to manure flow (these easily break down);

• Over application of manure causing runoff (especially on water saturated soils);

• Sump waste;

• Rain water that flows through a cow lane (leading up to a dairy) and off the premises;

• Improper irrigation with manure leaking into ditches.

Even following natural disaster, such as floods and blizzards, or disasters that cause power outages, the owner of the facility remains responsible for the appropriate disposal of manure and other waste from the farm. To prevent violations in waste handling it is best to have systems that have been constructed and inspected by professionals.

Manure handling capability should be greater than the predicted amount of manure that a farm will produce, and plans should be in place on how to prevent the inadvertent spread of manure to illegal areas in the event of a disaster.

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Last updated: September 23, 2005.