FROM the looks of it, the sheep fiasco has hardly ruffled any feathers in Pakistan. But in Australia, a storm has been unleashed, with the sheep taking centre stage on the airwaves and leading to multiple protests on the streets.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard took up the grievance with her Pakistani counterpart at a summit recently. Meanwhile, Australia has installed a ban on all live animal exports to Pakistan.
The story began with the original shipment being rebuffed by Bahraini authorities, reportedly because of scabby mouth disease. The sheep then made their way over to Karachi, and that’s when events that seem right out of a thriller story unfolded.
Amidst unconfirmed reports that some quarters wanted kickbacks when the sheep arrived in Pakistan, rumours started to abound about all sorts of contagions, from E.coli to anthrax, leading to the initiation of a sudden culling. The courts stepped in to resolve the fiasco, ordering a halt to the culling and recruiting the services of a laboratory in London to ascertain the health of the livestock.
The lab results revealed that the sheep were disease-free. Then, all of a sudden, the livestock importer withdrew the petition, resulting in the ban on the cull being revoked. All sorts of rumour-mongering began again, with some asserting that an out-of-court settlement had been reached.
This saga has helped to bring into the spotlight the multitude of healthcare deficiencies in the livestock sector. Starting from their arrival, we need to draft clear-cut guidelines for the import of live animals and the maintenance of quality checks. Australia has memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with countries in the Middle East and Africa that prevent problems at livestock destinations, including the key element in the MoU that animals be unloaded on arrival regardless of their health status. Presumably there is no such MoU between Australia and Pakistan, as both countries seemed to be on different wavelengths throughout the sheep saga.
The most important lesson to be learnt pertains to testing facilities. Local laboratories produced conflicting results, which necessitated that a foreign lab be called in to check the veracity of the claims. This is extremely disappointing and warrants immediate action. In case local laboratory results were manipulated, that is cause for even more concern.
The fact that a lab in London was approached means loss of foreign exchange and more importantly, time. Such basic testing facilities should be made available in every city in Pakistan to strengthen the quality-control checks on livestock.
Secondly, there was unnecessary fear-mongering in the press and on television. In the absence of fact-checking and given the sensational leanings of our popular press, the sheep were projected as being infected with all sorts of deadly diseases.
The fact of the matter is that they only had contagious ecthyma or scabby mouth disease, a parapoxvirus infection found globally wherever sheep and goats are raised. Pakistan does not have a contagious ecthyma surveillance system, so it is most likely that there are cases of it already in the country that go undetected.
In a 2011 report for Pakistan issued by the World Organisation for Animal Health, this disease is listed under ‘Unreported non OIE-Listed diseases’ and not under ‘Non OIE-Listed diseases absent in Pakistan during the reporting period or never reported’, implying deficient surveillance rather than a strict code of conduct that mandates the immediate culling of ecthyma-infected animals.
Therefore, there was no deadly risk present at any time, and the situation was greatly sensationalised. There was even talk of anthrax, and this only added fuel to the fire.
The truth is that contagious ecthyma is not transmitted by consumption of meat or milk; direct contact with lesions is the most commonly implicated route. And even in these cases, most infections in humans are localised and heal themselves spontaneously. Therefore, the public in Pakistan was never in any danger, and all reports about anthrax and foot and mouth disease were not accurate.
The shroud of secrecy surrounding this whole drama also does not make sense. The provincial government came out with conflicting statements. The finale where the importers withdrew their petition leading to subsequent killing of the remaining sheep only adds to the confusion. A clear-cut line from governmental quarters should have been instituted, so that the credibility of the systems in Pakistan could have been maintained in the face of intense international scrutiny.
The culling process turned out to be an even more unpleasant story, with footage broadcast of live sheep being buried, topped off with footage of a man sawing off a sheep’s neck. It was this brutal disregard for animal welfare that prompted massive protests in Australian cities. Even by our rather loose standards, the harsh culling process depicts a picture of utmost carelessness and negligence, not exactly helping the rather extreme image of the country abroad.
Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf promised the Australian prime minister a complete investigation into the matter, and hopefully this will turn out to be more than mere hollow words.
An independent inquiry should be carried out, which should present its detailed findings without any bias, specifying the exact reason why the sheep were culled even when they had been proven to be disease-free by an international lab. At the minimum, a system should be put in place for preventing such debacles in the future and assure quality-control check-ups in the local setting.
Officials implicated in the blatant abuse of sheep during the culling process should be brought to task. Hopefully, such scenarios will not be repeated in the future, and the deaths of these thousands of sheep would not have been in vain, and, in fact, would serve to strengthen healthcare and livestock systems in the country.
The writer is a Rhodes scholar doing his PhD in clinical medicine at the University of Oxford.