Dear Minister for Primary Industries,

Biosecurity and RHDV resilience and transmission.
RHDV2 has rapidly spread across Australia and is now present across the entire Australian continent with multiple direct links to New Zealand posing an incredible risk of being carried by one of the 1,384,432 visitors who arrive from Australia to New Zealand each year. This strain of RHDV2 which is now believed to be a recombinant G1/RHDV2, strain requires fewer virus particle to infect and is most likely the reason it has been able to spread so far and so quickly, posing a greatly increased risk of arrival in New Zealand.

MPI state that the risk of RHDV2 arriving from Australia is seen as low, this contradicts MAF, who state that as RCD spreads throughout Australia the risk of accidental arrival in New Zealand increases. They carry on to state and thereby confirm multiple scientific peer studies, that RCD is a very tough virus that can survive freezing, and remain infective on fabric for over 100 days at 20 degrees C. It is killed by higher temperatures (over 60 degrees C for two days) and sunlight. The most likely source of accidental introduction is on goods, clothing or livestock arriving from Australia. An illegal introduction cannot be discounted.

It only takes one person out of the 1.3 million arriving passengers to unknowingly walk on ground where an infected rabbit has been to then carry the virus to New Zealand.

So the question is how Bio Security will find and stop this virus from entering New Zealand. The virus particle being around 35 to 40nm in size and only a few virus particle on one out of 1,300,000 passengers?

Yours faithfully,

Gary Stephenson