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ILG meeting...

• A report of an email advertisement to purchase surplus veterinary hormonal drugs was received. This was referred to the Ministry of Health for investigation under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
• Fur processors found a broken tube of  cyanide among some furs that they were processing. The local regional council is taking the lead to investigate this.

The next meeting of the ILG is scheduled for Thursday, 17 May 2001.

AVMAC Meeting

A meeting of the Agricultural Compounds & Veterinary Medicines Advisory Council (AVMAC) was also held on Tuesday, 13 March 2001.

Brian Pidford updated members on the VPC Regulations. The proposed fee increase for new applications was discussed, and Brian advised that a consultation process on the proposed increase was about to begin. The proposed increase would not take effect until commencement of the HSNO Act.

Bruce Burdon (MAF Policy) updated members on the new legislation to be introduced 1 July 2001. The ACVM Act will be implemented with or without the HSNO Act.

Members were informed about the MAF Food roadshows that had taken place over the previous two weeks.

The next AVMAC meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 17 May 2001.

Operational Update

The ACVM Group now has a full team of Technical Assessors on Board (Toni Tana, Neil Kennington, Warren Hughes, Warren Tully and Sarah Ball) along with a new National Manager ACVM Approvals, Brian O’Sullivan.

As can be seen from the graphs below, there has been a build up of application numbers in the system. Primarily this is because the year to date has been the busiest ever application-wise for the ACVM Group. Although the new staff members are not fully up to speed yet, this will not impact negatively on the throughput of applications because a fair percentage are handled by the external assessors who have been with the ACVM Group for some time. In addition, we are expecting the implementation of the DAS service to have a positive effect on throughput times.

Several initiatives have been put into place to speed the process for applications – there is still considerable staff time spent in the pre-screen process in the attempt to get a proper application into the system. As advised in the article on page 2, the ACVM Group will allow only one ‘free chance’ in future to avoid spending unnecessary time on applications that are not up to standard. The Customer Service team is also taking the lead on a number of the simpler application types (low risk, provisional, direct cross references and some of the simpler changes) so they do not get caught in the longer queues managed by the Technical Assessors.

Animal Remedy Applications

Pesticide Applications