FMD research facility outbreak fear halts plan for Aussie-made vax

Australia has a deal with the United Kingdom to supply FMD vaccines in the event of an outbreak, which would arrive within a week.

When news of the Indonesian incursion broke, there was a push for Australia to develop its own vaccine, which could be rolled out faster, while being better suited to the country's conditions and livestock. However, scientists are unable to work on the virus, which is banned from Australia even for research purposes.

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National Exotic Disease Preparedness Coordinator Chris Parker told a parliamentary inquiry into biosecurity there was no proposal to import the virus, believing it would create "significant anxiety within our industry".

"I would remind you that there are places in the world where there have been escapes from a facility," Dr Parker said.

"I'm not suggesting it would escape from [the Australia Centre of Disease Preparedness]. But we would have to ensure that facilities were absolutely top-notch before we'd even contemplate doing something like this."

Australia recently went through an extensive process to import lumpy skin disease to manufacture a vaccine within Australia. But Dr Parker said the two were very different viruses and FMD had to be "contained at a higher standard of laboratory because there was a greater risk of an outbreak.

"LSD needs a vector... FMD is a really highly infectious agent that has a whole range of transmission methods - it can be transmitted by the wind, it can be transmitted by direct contact, it can be transmitted by fomites," Dr Parker said.

"Put simply, you want to be pretty sure that you had FMD contained, and you want to be pretty sure that ACDP would be able to meet that standard."

Since the Geelong research centre was built in 1985, a whole range of new containment standards had come into play, and the facility may require "significant investment" if it was to host the virus.

Vaccines are also seen as a weapon of last resort in an outbreak, with targeted containment methods thought to be more effective in an initial outbreak.

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The CSIRO ran FMD outbreak simulations to model the effectiveness of vaccines in reducing the spread of the virus and found they would only have a big impact in a large outbreak in a very densely farmed area, such as the Victorian dairy industry.

Importing the virus - even for scientific and prevention purposes - could also have trade ramifications, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry acting deputy secretary Nicola Hinder said.

"There will be some trading partners that would automatically jump to the immediate assumption that because Australia has imported the virus, we effectively have the virus and therefore we're looking for the vaccine," Ms Hinder said.

"Those are the much harder perceptions to be able to counteract by communication. We would need to approach that carefully and in the considered way to be able to do outreach to our trading partners, to be very clear and very concise about why we are taking that action."

Dr Parker said there was nothing stopping Australia from sending scientists to other countries to work on the virus, and several have already been sent to Thailand for research.

"We need to be pretty convinced we need something particularly special about importing it that we couldn't get from exactly those activities," Dr Parker said.

Australia is trying to develop an mRNA synthetic vaccine for FMD, which would not require samples of the virus to create.