OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — Through the 2018 Farm Bill, $10.2 million was awarded through the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program as well as the National Animal Health Laboratory Network. Oklahoma received four separate awards, totaling $386,281, which will be split among the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, Oklahoma State University, and the Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory.
“USDA has always worked best when it collaborates with states, universities, and farmers and ranchers out in the field,” said USDA Undersecretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Greg Ibach in the USDA-APHIS press release. “Our Farm Bill programs allow us to continue to strengthen these vital partnerships. Working together, we can further improve our ability to protect U.S. animal health and respond to animal disease events. At the same time, we will continue to ensure we have an effective insurance policy in the extremely rare chance of an outbreak of certain high consequence foreign animal diseases, like foot-and-mouth disease.”
Under the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program, projects awarded funding will advance the capabilities, capacity and readiness of the nation’s animal agriculture sector responders through training and exercises. The projects will address training and exercise priorities in all major livestock industries and all regions of the United States, helping us enhance our existing disease emergency preparedness and response efforts.
Through the NADPRP program, Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry received $18,199 for the Foreign Animal Disease Southern Agriculture Functional Exercise. Additionally, Oklahoma State University received $49,522 for a Rapidly Deployable Animal Disease and Livestock Disaster Communication and Education Network. A full list of awarded projects is available here.
Under the National Animal Health Laboratory Network program, funded projects will address test method development and validation, improving electronic transmission of data, increasing biosafety and biosecurity in laboratories and enhancing emergency preparedness. These efforts will help enhance NAHLN diagnostic capability.
Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, a NAHLN laboratory, was awarded $318,560 through two separate projects. The first being the ‘Development of an Interactive Spatial Agrometrics Tool for the Calculation of Livestock (Cattle, Swine and Poultry) Populations in the United States at the County and Parish Level’ with $160,424 in funding; and the second, ‘Deep Learning Computational Algorithms for Disease Diagnosis by Genome Sequencing’ awarded $158,136. A full list of awarded projects is available here.
APHIS is also moving forward with the development of a National Animal Vaccine and Veterinary Countermeasures Bank by issuing a request for proposals. The first priority of the NAVVCB is to increase the U.S. stockpile of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) vaccines. The vaccine bank will allow APHIS to stockpile animal vaccine and other related products, serving as an effective insurance policy in the extremely rare chance of an outbreak of certain high consequence foreign animal diseases, like foot and mouth disease.
More information about these programs is available at: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/resources/farmbill.