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 over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking Dairy · Foot-and-mouth disease travel risk and simple biosecurity tips | Ep. 130 · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

which obviously a lot of people want to do in South Africa and that's fine, but the risk of you sort of coming into direct contact with infected animals is still really low.

Doesn't mean you should treat the risk as zero.

Important thing is the majority of the risk to New Zealand is handled by a really good board of biosecurity.

There's lots of things that happen at the border that take as much risk away as possible.

But there are things you can do to lessen the burden at the border and reduce the risk to the country.

You know, you need to make sure that you are not bringing back clothing or footwear that's covered in dirt or, you know, has been in contact with animals that should all be sort of hot washed before you even step foot into the country.

Also good to know that it's not just South Africa that has FND and has a risk.

There's plenty of countries in the world that sort of ongoing FND problems and so travel to lots of parts of the world comes with some degree of risk.

You can mitigate a lot of the risk yourself just by being sensible about what you are bringing back into New Zealand or what you're trying to bring back into New Zealand.

and a reflection that the bulk of the risk coming in is, well, A, a legally imported product, but B, a virus on people's clothing and footwear.

First plug, I guess, for DairnZ resources is that DairnZ has a good visitor policy resource that you could refer to if you're sort of trying to figure out how you want to design your visitor policy.

Both DairnZ and MPI recommendations, particularly when you're coming from F&D countries, but all countries, you know, if you're sort of applying a good standard of practice is to stay away from farms for a week after arrival into the country.

Obviously, that's quite challenging for farm workers and farmers who are coming back into the country to stay away from animals.

So that's where a lot of your risk management comes from before you even step foot into the country.

That's where you're careful about your clothing, you're careful about your footwear.

People can't get FND, but they can very briefly carry it in their nasal passages and on themselves.

So, you know, there is a tiny element of risk here.

One of the upsides, I guess, of New Zealand being where it is, is for the most part, we're a pretty long flight from anywhere.

So were you to be in a very temporary carrier state, you're probably out of that state by the time you reach New Zealand.

But having some gap between entry into the country and stepping foot on a farm is ideal and seven days would be the perfect recommendation.

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