One of my favourite things about social media is the easy
access it gives me to information from government departments: WINZ, IRD,
Customs, they’re all there. Most of them treat Twitter like a help desk and
merely answer questions during business hours but some, MPI in particular,
manage to be brilliantly funny and genuinely helpful at the same time.
MPI is one of the accounts I have notifications turned on
for, which mean whenever they tweet I get an alert on my phone. As soon as
there is a development with mycoplasma bovis I know about it, and if I have a
question it is answered very quickly.
The flip side to you and I having access to an incredibly
responsive government department is that every other muppet on the internet
does too; I’ve seen the people who run the MPI account subjected to endless
bouts of ill-informed outrage on Twitter. This, however, is far better than
Facebook where they get threats of actual violence, a nice reminder why I’ve
never signed up to that particular platform.
In the wake of the mycoplasma bovis outbreak I’ve often found
myself defending MPI on Twitter, partly
because their social media team is so effortlessly brilliant and don’t deserve
the vitriol sent their way, and partly because they’re unfairly copping it from
all sides: the general public and farmers alike.
The general public’s concern seem to be divided into two
camps; outrage that the disease incursion occurred in the first place and
outrage that the infected cattle are being processed for human consumption.
MPI resolutely plug away dispelling myths, referring back to
the science, pointing out the differences between M. Bovis and BSE.
Blaming MPI for the incursion itself is ridiculous, they
don’t randomly send officers to farms to check for diseases that we don’t know
are there on the off chance they might find something, and the disease itself
is very difficult to test for. M. Bovis requires multiple tests over a period
of time, a positive test means you’ve got it but a negative test doesn’t
necessarily mean you’re safe. Given the stakes for the country and the
individual farmers we all want the testing to be thorough and accurate.
Farmer concern has largely been
centred on wanting to know how the disease arrived and why it has been allowed
to spread as far as it has. As far as how it was introduced, speculation is rife
but ultimately we may never know.
The disease has spread through
the country via stock movement, and farmer expectation was that MPI would press
a button on the NAIT computer and know within minutes exactly which animals
from an infected farm had gone where. Unfortunately, while NAIT compliance of
stock transfers from farm to slaughter sit at something like 95%, compliance
for inter farm transfers is around 30%.
There are many problems with
NAIT, from the decision to use low frequency (FDX) tags when every other
country rejected them in favour of HDX to the clunky user interface, but at the
end of the day it has been low industry compliance that has led to delays in
tracing stock movement. We should all be extremely grateful Foot and Mouth
wasn’t the disease to expose the flaws in NAIT.
