Most affected areas to get F&M vaccines first: Steenhuisen

Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen says that the distribution of the one- million foot and mouth disease vaccine doses that have arrived, will focus on the provinces that have been the most affected.

The first consignment went to the Onderstepoort Biological Products where they will be dispatched to provinces.

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Steenhuisen welcomed the arrival of the vaccines from Argentina but warned that the vaccines by themselves are not a silver bullet and said emphasis should be on good biosecurity on the farms.

“KwaZulu Natal, the Free State, and the North West province and to some degree Mpumalanga. So, they will get the bulk of this but every province will be receiving something out of this first batch here, to enable us to begin to break the back of the virus going forward. How it will be distributed, the Ministerial Task Team, has developed a heat map for the country where every municipal boundary has been broken up into a primary, secondary or tertiary classification. Obviously, the primary sectors are where the disease is at its most virulent and is spreading the fastest, so those primary areas will be focused.”