New Zealand pig farmers are dismayed that MAF has given the green light for uncooked and potentially contaminated pork meat to be imported into the country.

MAF has just updated its Import Health Standards and will now allow uncooked pork meat from countries afflicted with Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, or PRRS, to be sold direct to consumers.

Until now, imported pork has had to be cured before it reaches consumers, a process which ensures the disease is killed.
 
The pork industry fears that that contaminated uncooked pork will end up getting back to New Zealand pigs – unleashing the disease here.
 
MAF Deputy director-general Carol Barnao said late last week that an independent scientific review panel has OK’d imports of uncooked pork from PRRS countries.

“As a result of that review the standards that were published yesterday have been developed that very carefully define what sorts of cuts of meat could be put onto the New Zealand market to mitigate the risk to the New Zealand industry.”

Carol Barnao says the science behind the decision to allow PRRS infected meat into the country is sound.

“We’ve certainly done a lot of work, a lot of quantitative scientific assessment, to actually make a judgement on what was the risk.

"Right now the science says that the likelihood of a risk through the importing of this uncooked meat is the equivalent of an average of one outbreak every 1, 127 years.

“So there is a significant difference in terms of the standards and sort of products that can actually get into the New Zealand market.”

However, the pork industry points to previous research done in 2007 by leading New Zealand’s veterinary academics, including Massey University’s Professor Roger Morris, that claimed allowing uncooked PRRS meat into the country was very “high-risk”.

In fact, the report said there would be a 95 percent likelihood of a multi-farm outbreak within three years.