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Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor told The Country’s Jamie Mackay that they had found positive for the cattle disease on three farms.
The Ashburton Guardian reported that the new positive case was on a dairy farm.
While the news of the new case was disappointing, it was not unexpected during the birthing season, O’Connor said.
The ministry was concerned about infection from either farm, but had the systems to deal with it and was working on track and trace now, O’Connor said.
“We’ll get through it”.
M. bovis was expected to return, as it was a very difficult disease to identify, O’Connor said.
“We were on one farm. We never thought that was it.”
O’Connor believed that testing for M.bovis would have to continue for at least 10 years before the cattle disease was eradicated from New Zealand, but was confident that it could be accomplished.
“We are reaching a point where costs have come down, the impact on farmers is very low and we have it under control, if not eradicated.”
Bulk milk testing for Mycoplasma bovis earlier in the month detected 28 dairy farms that required further investigation.
Figures from the Ministry of Primary Industries in August showed that there was only one farm actively infected with the cattle disease prior to this.
The reported number of tests completed is for testing M. bovis samples from on-farm research. They do not include the Bulk Tank Milk (BTM) screen for antibodies to M. bovis.
From June-August 2020 there have been 13,379 tests for BTM.
Of these tests, there have been 53 farms that require research on the farm. BTM is a screening test that looks for antibodies, an indication that an animal in the herd has been exposed to M. bovis.
Further testing and analysis of the farm’s risk profile is required before determining whether a farm is confirmed to be infected or not.
