Vaccination

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The UK national organic standards (Defra, 2006) states that statutory health plans for organic farms must “allow for the evolution of a farming system progressively less dependant on allopathic veterinary medicinal products”. While vaccines are classified as allopathic veterinary medicinal products, the standards permit their use “where there is a known disease risk”.

In practice, most of the organic sector bodies require justification of vaccine use either in a written health plan or by a separate application. The definition of a “known disease risk” may, however, cause problems in situations where veterinary opinion has not been considered adequate by the certification body, or where a producer has decided to discontinue all vaccine use without implementing any other disease control measures.

A decision support tool for  vaccine use was produced as part of Defra project OF0310 "Vaccine use in organic cattle and sheep systems: Development of a decision support tool based on risk assessment" (The University of Reading, 2003) in order to:

• help organic livestock producers and their veterinarians to assess an individual farm situation in relation to a specific disease risk,

• implement specific risk management measures and to communicate the decision with adequate precision to the certification bodies; and

• provide certification bodies with baseline information on risk factors and risk management measures and their significance, so as to adequately justify decisions on vaccine use.

The decision support tool can be found at www.destvac.reading.ac.uk