The Taranaki District Health Board is warning parents to keep children away from sick calves as new research shows cases of a nasty stomach bug called VTEC (Verotoxin-producing Escherichia coli) are slowly climbing.
Research has found that scouring calves are the most common carriers of VTEC. Photo: 123RF
Medical student Claire Richardson researched the disease and found that scouring calves (calves with diarrhoea) are the most common carriers of the disease, and children between one and four years old are over 20-times more likely to get infected.
The disease was first detected in New Zealand in 1993 and Taranaki has one of the highest rates of VTEC with 67 cases in the past 10 years.
Taranaki's medical officer of health Jonathan Jarman said this could be because there are 500,000 cows and 100,000 people in the region.
Dr Jarman said VTEC was a serious disease.
"The illness for most people is quite a nasty tummy bug, severe abdominal pain and there can be blood in the bowel movements, and nearly 50 percent (47.8) of people end up in hospital.
"The thing that is really quite frightening is that 14.9 percent developed a complication called haemolytic uraemic syndrome, the blood cells start to destroy themselves and the kidneys go into renal failure and the person ends up on dialysis. We're talking about kids under five on dialysis - this is something that we definitely want to focus on and prevent if we can."
He said unfortunately not many people knew about it.
"One of the intriguing things about this disease is that it's actually more common than leptospirosis, but no one has heard of it.
"This is something that we want to work on before calving next year, we want to make sure that every farming parent in Taranaki knows about VTEC and knows how to reduce the chance of their kid catching this disease."
Dr Jarman said the people needed to keep children away from calves with scours (diarrhoea) and make sure they wash their hands after touching animals.
The Taranaki DHB wanted to work with farmers to try and reduce the amount of VTEC in the environment, but this could take some time because the bug was common in healthy cattle and could live in the soil for up to 150 days, said Dr Jarman.
