Livestock are at risk from many other infectious diseases in addition to foot and mouth, avian influenza and bluetongue.

Old diseases that are returning to farms are bovine tuberculosis and tick-borne diseases. Also of concern are endemic diseases caused by infectious agents that affect the welfare, productivity and economic value like abortion and pneumonia, parasitic diseases such as worms and scab, gastrointestinal diseases such as Johne's disease, skin diseases, mastitis and lameness.

With so many threats to farming, the role of the Moredun Research Institute and its various divisions to animal welfare to Scotland and elsewhere remains clear.

That was the unequivocal message from Professor Julie Fitzpatrick, chief executive and scientific director of the Moredun Foundation, speaking at its press day.

As with all chief executives charged with running an organisation that is heavily dependent on government support, she emphasised the need for adequate funds for the areas of vital research the organisation undertakes, and, more importantly, for future work her team would like more resources for.

Fortunately, the Scottish Government is providing £6m a year in a five-year financing package while the Moredun has successfully attracted an additional £3.8m of external income giving them an annual budget for research of nearly £10m.

Climate change and the intensification of livestock systems are creating new disease challenges, and the institute is at the forefront of finding solutions.

Typical of the innovative research being undertaken is an attempt to develop a vaccine for mastitis in dairy cows. It is an economically important disease that accounts for 38% of the costs of disease in the dairy industry, with each individual case estimated to cost the dairy farmer £175.

Cumulatively, clinical cases are estimated to be costing the national dairy herd £168m a year, while the costs of sub-clinical infection are unknown.

In light of limited past success, Moredun scientists have adopted an alternative approach to the development of a vaccine against Streptococcus uberous, the so-called "environmental" pathogen, normally considered to be acquired through contact with such materials as contaminated bedding.

As part of a commercially financed project, state-of-the-art technologies, including genome sequencing and mass-spectrometric analysis of proteins could lead to a breakthrough vaccine in the future.

More significantly, the approach being adopted within the mastitis project is equally as applicable to the study of numerous other pathogens of humans and animals, and is currently being employed in other project areas within Moredun's Control of Bacterial Diseases Division.

Fitzpatrick conceded that much of the work at the Moredun involves genetically manipulating pathogens as a laboratory tool to understand how those pathogens function.