There have been repeated attempts to draw these results into the public arena both in Australia and New Zealand, but without success. Surely before any valid decision can be made regarding RHD import, these test results must be made public and the purposes for this seemingly clandestine withholding of data involving human health and what appears to be the intentional misrepresentation of statistically validated occurrences of human illness in people exposed to RHD must be completely illuminated. The Victoria Weekly Times confirmed in their 27 November issue that in some places in the Australian countryside, although RHD had been present, rabbit numbers have increased rather than decreased. It is not known whether this increase is due to reduced predation because of 1080 baiting of foxes, caliciviruses killing predators, or other effects such as RHD losing its' rabbit killing factors, or mutant non-lethal RHD variants providing RHD resistance as is documented in the United Kingdom and Europe, or simply unknown and unpredictable transmission factors. What is known is that now in some areas increasing rabbit populations are higher than the pre-RHD levels.
Several incidents demonstrate that the Australian experiment has gone awry.
More sensitive ways of tracking RHD exposure, spread, and infections in all species even in the absence of frank disease must be developed. Simply judging RHD presence on the basis of a populations' disappearance or illness and dead body counts is not acceptable. This is unbelievable. In Australia, an uncontrollable, entirely unpredictable, often deadly, but sometimes silent virus has been introduced and purposefully spread across an entire continent. RHD's origins in China a decade ago remain unexplained.