RUMA Agri launches vaccines survey

Today (Monday 12th May) RUMA has launched a vaccines survey designed to gather insights from vets, farmers and SQPs about the vaccines shortages that have been a growing source of concern for UK livestock sectors over recent years. This is an issue which we understand has affected every livestock sector and so we are calling on all our RUMA Alliance members and supporters to share details about the survey across your networks to help secure as much feedback as possible.

The survey will be open for responses from now until Friday 27 June at 5pm. Vets, farmers and SQPs are all encouraged to share any vaccine supply insights by answering a set of questions that aim to build a picture of what supply challenges each sector has been facing, and the short and long term impacts of these disruption issues.

The RUMA Vaccine survey can be accessed via this link : https://forms.office.com/e/D6EYM81Mip

To manage expectations, this is not a high-level scientific research survey, we are however hoping it will inform the work VMD is doing on vaccines preparedness and help RUMA to work with the sector vets to potentially prepare plan B guidelines for when vaccines supply is disrupted. So, we do need industry feedback and your help to get that would be appreciated.

 The survey is open to all, and we will be promoting it via the RUMA Alliance members to vets, SQP’s and farmers as well as across our own comms channels plus sector and professional media. Vaccines play a key role in safeguarding the health and wellbeing of animals and limited or no supply, which is something that has been reported more frequently over the past few years by numerous livestock sectors, can have widespread implications on animal wellbeing. This could include an increase in antibiotic use to manage conditions that may otherwise have been prevented with vaccinations.