Quarantine for life

Press, 4 February 1986, Page 6

Quarantine for life

PA Hamilton A Hamilton company will fly in 400 exotic sheep tomorrow to be quarantined in an Auckland warehouse for life. An earlier attempt to establish imported sheep in New Zealand to boost production was a fiasco with all the animals being slaughtered in 1978 after they developed the incurable degenerative disease, scrapie. Attacking the nervous system of sheep, scrapie has scientists baffled. It behaves like a virus and has an incubation period

of up to 10 years. The Government is allowing Animal Enterprises to bring in 400 rams and ewes from scra-pie-free Denmark and Finland, subject to strict quarantine conditions. The Ministry of Agriculture’s animal health division director, Dr Peter O’Hara, said the company would quarantine the animals in an Auckland warehouse for life. The official quarantine facilities on Somes Island are crowded with lambs from the ministry’s own exotic sheep project, which involves frozen em-

bryo transplants.

Dr O’Hara said Animal Enterprises would give the new genetic material to farmers through embryo transfer, rather than direct mating. The offspring would not be available immediately. The ministry has direct control over the Auckland quarantine station, though the company built it. Dr O’Hara said he was confident the sheep were free of maedichronic pneumonia, but it was impossible to be sure about scrapie because of its long incubation period.