Controlled Disease and the Duty to Report

#The call you have to make before you are sure

A cow is off her feed on a Tuesday morning. She is drooling more than a cow should, and she is lame on both front feet. You have seen lameness a hundred times, and drool from a wire cut in the tongue. Nothing here is a diagnosis.

You still have to phone the state veterinarian, today, before anybody has looked at a sample.

Everything else in this module — ticks, resistance, refugia, the drench you tested last lesson — is a decision you make on your own farm with your own money. This lesson is about the diseases where the decision was taken out of your hands by an Act of Parliament, and where the trigger is not certainty but suspicion.

#Suspicion is the trigger, and it binds everybody

The Animal Diseases Act 35 of 1984 puts the duty in two places, and it is worth knowing both because they catch different people.

Two phrases do the work. "Can reasonably be suspected" — the Act deliberately does not wait for a positive result, because for a disease like foot-and-mouth the days you spend waiting are the days the virus spends moving. "I wanted to be sure before I bothered them" describes the offence, not the excuse.

And "any other person". This is not the owner's private problem. Your farm worker carries it, so does the neighbour who walks past your kraal, the buyer who came to look at weaners, the transporter, the vet and the laboratory. Anyone who handles your stock is under a personal legal duty that you are responsible for training them to meet.

#Two lists, two regulations, two addressees

Farming media use "notifiable" as a loose word for "serious". In South African law it is a specific category — and the smaller of the two.

The Annexure 3 notifiable list is short: bluetongue, bovine malignant catarrhal fever (snotsiekte), lumpy skin disease, Rift Valley fever, strangles and swine erysipelas. Everything else that matters — FMD, African swine fever, anthrax, brucellosis, rabies, tuberculosis, Newcastle disease, notifiable avian influenza, sheep scab, PRRS — is controlled, under a different regulation. And there is a catch-all: any animal disease not indigenous or native to the Republic is automatically controlled. You do not need to find it on a list for the duty to attach.

One reconciliation, because the Act and the regulations look inconsistent side by side. The Act addresses the controlled-disease report to the director; Reg 12(1), made under that same section, has you phone the responsible state veterinarian or technical officer; Reg 12A sends the notifiable-disease report to the state veterinarian. Your first call is the state veterinarian either way. The distinction matters because a farmer who thinks "notifiable" is the whole universe will scan a list of six diseases, fail to find African swine fever on it, and conclude wrongly that ASF need not be reported. It must. Two lists, two regulations, one phone call.

Treat every published list as indicative, including the departmental leaflet cited here — it still carries DAFF branding, so it predates the 2019 reorganisation into DALRRD. GN 2318 in Government Gazette 47133 of 29 July 2022 was the twenty-fourth amending notice to the 1986 regulations. Confirm the current Table 2 entry with your state vet.

#The step everyone forgets: Regulation 12(3)

Phoning the state vet feels like discharging the duty. It is not. Reg 12(3) requires the responsible person to also forthwith notify:

• every owner or manager of adjoining land, and every owner of susceptible animals on the same or adjoining land; and
• every prospective buyer of your susceptible animals, and every person who bought susceptible animals from you in the preceding 30 days.

Work it as an actual morning, not a clause. It is still that Tuesday. Say your place backs onto four properties and two of those neighbours run cattle: six calls, before you have opened your own books. Then the register. In the last thirty days you sold six weaners to a smallholder in Randvaal, four to a buyer near Vereeniging, and two to a man whose name you have but whose number sits somewhere in a WhatsApp thread. One more buyer is booked to view on Saturday. Ten calls — and the tenth one you cannot make.

That is Reg 12(3) in one arithmetic. Compliance is impossible without a sales register that captures who bought what, when, and how to reach them. Build it on the day you start selling, not on the day the state vet arrives.

#FMD: what a controlled disease actually does to your business

Foot-and-mouth is the case study, because it is rewriting the South African red meat market and because it shows what happens after the report.

The report is the beginning, not the end. Five things follow, and each constrains your business rather than your veterinary judgement:

1. Quarantine on suspicion. The property goes under quarantine immediately on suspicion — before confirmation — and movement of live cloven-hoofed animals and unprocessed products off the farm stops.
2. Disease Management Areas. Where animals are unfenced, movement control cannot be applied, or owners will not co-operate, the Minister may declare a DMA by Government Gazette notice. Every property inside it becomes one epidemiological unit under the same movement conditions, regardless of your own herd's status — the KZN boundaries were last re-set by Government Gazette Notice 52318 of 17 March 2025.
3. Vaccination is not yours to do. "Vaccination against FMD is strictly government controlled in South Africa and may only be performed by state veterinary services." Doing it privately is not initiative, it is an offence.
4. Controlled slaughter is voluntary and conditional — animals must be clinically healthy with no indication of circulating virus for at least 14 days. That meat may be sold locally; export needs the importing country's agreement.
5. Export is permanently prohibited from the FMD infected and protection zones. Not suspended — prohibited. Zone status is a permanent ceiling on where your product can go.

#The rule that changed under the industry

Here is why this lesson refuses to give you numbers to memorise.

Pigs held under an FMD section 9 declaration were subject to a 90-day holding period. On 8 July 2026 that was cut to 42 days, and the market felt it immediately: stranded market-ready pigs came into supply at the same moment as imported cover ordered during the disruption arrived on an eight-to-ten week lag (Business Report, 23 July 2026). The farm price fell hard. A producer budgeting on 90 days was planning on a number that no longer existed; one budgeting on 42 would have been just as wrong three months earlier.

That change reaches us through the trade press, not the Government Notice itself — a second reason not to treat it as fixed. Holding periods, controlled-area boundaries and DMA lines change by gazette notice, without warning and without consulting your cash flow. Confirm the position with your district state veterinarian before every consignment. A course, a co-op notice board or a WhatsApp group is not a source for this.

#What to do on Monday

Put the district state veterinarian's number in your phone and in the crush, and tell whoever handles your stock what they are personally required to report. Then open your sales book: can it produce every buyer of the last thirty days, with a contactable number, in under an hour? If not, fix that first — Regulation 12(3) is the part of this law you will fail on, and it fails quietly, months before any disease arrives.