News of the vaccination campaign in the Netherlands using Syva’s BTV3 vaccine!
The vaccination campaign has, according to the competent authorities, begun with the immunisation of sheep. While most vets are entering their third week of vaccination for sheep, cases of BTV3 are being reported in young calves from cows that have not yet been vaccinated.
As you can imagine, we’re keeping a very close eye on the results of this huge vaccination campaign, which began the day after 6 April when the first million doses of our vaccine arrived in the Netherlands. Dutch vets are busy vaccinating the 662,000 or so sheep (source CBS: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek) on all the country’s farms that could once again be targeted by the Culicoides midges, whose period of activity has already been announced.
That’s why we thought it would be interesting to relay this short report, which was broadcast in the Dutch public press on Monday. In less than two minutes, he answers some essential questions about the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety.
As the young vet interviewed by the WNL journalist quite rightly replied, “It’s not a miracle, it’s simply vaccination”. If we still needed convincing of the benefits of vaccination.
When asked whether he should be concerned about the side-effects in the leaflet, he replied that he had read the leaflet carefully and that there were indeed an awful lot of potential side-effects, but as far as he was concerned, he answered :
“As far as we’ve seen so far, we started last Monday, so exactly a week ago, and we were worried about reactions at the injection site or that the animals might have muscle pains, but so far we haven’t seen any of that. Nor have there been any complaints at the time, and the people we called afterwards have so far been satisfied.” It should be noted that 10,000 sheep have been vaccinated on the farm where the film was shot. Even though the virus seems to be circulating again, the animals that have been vaccinated so far are not affected.
We’re really pleased to hear this, and to be able to make a real contribution to curbing this epidemic through vaccination. However, there is still a lot of work to be done by Dutch vets, who should start vaccinating cows. Given that there are some 3.8 million cows in the Netherlands (source CBS: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek) and that they need to be vaccinated twice, 4 weeks apart, Dutch vets and farmers will be hard pressed for several more weeks. Time is running out, because as this vet points out, “Last weekend I was on duty and I’ve already seen the first signs of bluetongue. Not in the sheep, but all in the young calves of the cows that were in the fields and stables and hadn’t yet been vaccinated. And those, yes, they are already sick and dying of bluetongue.”
We can probably never repeat it enough, Vaccination is an essential part of BTV prevention that is totally meaningful!
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