Mitch Cooper
speaker
284 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Mitch Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Kia ora, my name's Mitch Cooper.
I'm a Senior Technical and Policy Advisor for Biosecurity for Daring Z. I was a clinical dairy vet just over a decade in the Waikato before moving into a role where I inform a lot of our biosecurity materials and policy.
A couple of levels there.
So if you had it in your animals, it's quite a nasty disease.
Foot and mouth disease is named quite accurately because the primary lesions are in the feet and on the hooves.
And so what you normally see is vesicles or blisters that rupture in sort of several areas of the mouth.
and feet between the toes and along the edge between where the wall meets, the hoof wall meets the skin.
Really painful.
Those lesions cause cows to not want to eat for quite extended periods of time.
They become severely lame.
You can get lesions in other places on the teats and in other areas which can cause sort of chronic issues.
It's really infectious.
So you normally see 100% of a herd with some level of clinical signs and normally 1-5% of those animals will die from it.
And even the animals that survive, a lot of them end up with sort of pretty significant long-term consequences and they often end up becoming viral carriers sort of long-term.
So pretty nasty disease and really, really infectious.
If we get it in New Zealand, there's some fairly significant implications.
I won't, I guess, go into the real nitty-gritty of the disease response because some of those decisions will be made at the time, although lots of those decisions are pre-made.
But the general impact is that there will be a national livestock movement standstill, which halts the movement of all livestock for potentially quite a long time, could be sort of
for weeks or more, depending on how things are tracking at the time.
So sort of fairly significant impacts on the ability to just farm in a normal way because it's so contagious.
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