Biosecurity 101

Is it a practice? Is it a disease?

Is it a noun? Or a verb?

It’s complicated. It conjures up images of people in hazard suits, white powder in envelopes etc, but it’s so much more than that. 

In Australia and commonly across the world biosecurity is ‘protection of living things – us, animals, plants and the whole environment including agriculture from pests, weeds and disease’.

It’s a process and an outcome.

Simple to understand and explain? – well, we wish it were. Why is it so hard to describe?

Because its breadth and depth is staggering. The landscape of biosecurity shape shifts, its complexity challenges our ability to package it into a simple concept or idea or solution.  Take zoonoses like the current COVID19 pandemic, or Ebola, Mad Cow Disease, and Hendra or a hundred other plant or animal diseases  or  invasive animals such as the cane toad, feral pigs, red fire ants, or weeds such as lantana, blackberry or serrated tussock. The list goes on and it depends where we live in this world as to whether something is a weed or an invasive species or a treasured plant or animal? Is it exotic, or native or plain just new. 

Sometimes the biosecurity risk is a plant or animal and sometimes the biosecurity risk affects a plant or animal. 

Where does the environment or agriculture fit in?

How do our shopping habits or our holidays affect it?

It’s hard to find an area of our life that isn’t affected by biosecurity and that’s why it’s hard.

The solutions are both highly complex and extremely simple, very expensive or  really cheap. They can involve research, high tech, cutting edge science or simple human behaviours. What we do know is that we can’t manage or minimise risks unless we know them or understand them.

Many of the ways we can minimise risks are really simple, but as we know from the current pandemic even when the disease may harm or kill us we humans are pretty resistant to simple behaviour change.

 People are at the heart of making biosecurity work effectively. The biosecurity issues we have are identified by the way we see and interpret our environment, our agriculture or our own health.

It is impacted by our country, our environment, governments, history, our agriculture and our economy.

Human behaviour impacts both the problem and the solution.