Q
As of Nov. 5, signups of premises under the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) were at 423,781, or about 30% of premises in the U.S. But aside from premises registration, what other progress has been made with NAIS?

A
I'm in the clearance process for the business plan, and I expect a public release in early to mid December. It will get down to the core material work that has to be done to make a successful animal ID system work.

One of the things we're really going to focus on is how to get at and achieve 48-hour traceability by building on the strength of what's worked so well in the past. So it's building on the existing efforts with brucellosis eradication, bovine tuberculosis (TB) programs, Johne's, pseudorabies — to really use our existing disease programs as a platform to be able to achieve 48-hour traceability in the event of a disease outbreak.

We're setting up the ability for these programs to migrate into radio-frequency ID (RFID). USDA just purchased about 1.5 million RFID tags for use in the disease programs. We'll start with TB first. So that now as we start doing TB trace-outs and testing, we will use an RFID tag in cows we test. That helps greatly on manpower, labor and accuracy, because when you have to come back and test a second time, everything is already using RFID.

The government will absorb these costs, just as it covers those costs today with TB and TB tracebacks.

We'll start with TB, and I hope to be able to pilot this program in a similar way with brucellosis, but we're working on the details of how to move forward on that with some of the bangs vaccinations efforts in the same way.

The lesson I strongly heard from the countryside is that if animal ID is going to work and work well, it needs to work for USDA's own disease programs, and that's what we're really embracing and moving forward with. One of the key things is our half-dozen databases around the country for each of the disease programs, and we're doing the investment work to make sure they can communicate with each other so that you can quickly mine that data in the event of needing to do traceback.

Q
What's the status of the NAIS business plan?

A
It's really very close to release. A few draft versions of the plan were handed out at the Animal Health Association meeting in late October. I'm waiting on some of those veterinarians to provide feedback. But I'm hoping by the first week or two of December to be able to have a public release of that plan.

We'll also put it up on the NAIS Web site (www.usda.gov/nais) and seek comments on it. But I really want something out there that gives a 3-5 year vision of where we're going as well as what we've already achieved with animal ID.

I think I'll have some good, solid commonsense news for folks. We're basically able to achieve 48-hour traceability on poultry today. We can easily achieve 48-hour traceability by 2009 on pork. We can probably achieve it in sheep by building on the scrapie-surveillance program. And then the real work begins with what we have to do with cattle, both dairy and beef.

Q
What does Mike Johanns' exit as USDA Secretary mean for NAIS?

A
The high priority of work on animal ID hasn't changed, largely because this is about preparedness in the event of catastrophic disease. And so it's very removed from the politics of who is sitting directly in the USDA Secretary's chair.