March 4, 2004
 

Animal Health Experts Call For United Effort Against FMD

Eliminating foot-and-mouth disease from the Western Hemisphere will take a united effort among governments, businesses and farmers, animal health experts said Wednesday.
 
"This work can't just be between governments. It has to be between the private and public sectors," said Roberto Rodrigues, a spokesman with Brazil's ministry of agriculture, during the start of a two-day meeting about the disease sponsored by the Pan American Health Organization and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "We are all brothers in this fight. If one loses, we all lose."
 
Foot-and-mouth disease is a highly contagious viral disease and affects cloven-hoofed animals like cattle, sheep and pigs. It causes sores, blisters and fever. It's deadly for livestock, but harmless to people.
 
The U.S. hasn't had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease since 1929, but it had been widespread throughout Central and South America until it was brought under control in the 1980s and 1990s. It re-emerged in the southern countries of South America in 2000 and 2001, but the number of cases has declined lately.
 
Jose Leon Rivera, Peru's minister of agriculture, said his country's success in eliminating foot-and-mouth disease is partly due to the creation of 226 local health committees, which helped adapt animal health care to the needs of the areas they represent. The country also trained 223 community leaders in vaccination and sanitary education.
 
Health officials who attended Wednesday's meeting said such efforts, that include farmers, cattle producers and others at the local level, need to be coordinated and implemented by all countries.
 
Better tests to determine if an animal has been infected, the creation of incident command systems to respond faster to situations and the formation of an international task force to develop a plan to guide countries on how to eliminate the disease are some of the other steps needed to eliminate the disease, said James Butler, a deputy under secretary with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
 
"The next steps we need to take are an assessment of the resources that we have," he said.
 
Charles Riemenschneider, director of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the U.N. Liaison Office for North America, said it's now more important than ever to make sure that Central and South American countries are free of the disease because of recent events in the U.S.
 
More than 50 countries banned U.S. beef and cattle after the discovery of a single case of mad cow disease in Washington state in December - the first case in the U.S.
 
A type of flu that is highly contagious among poultry was discovered last month on a farm in Gonzales County, Texas, about 50 miles east of San Antonio, causing South Korea and the European Union to ban all poultry imports from the U.S. and Mexico.
 
"Importers are turning to South America for their meat products," he said. "This shows the need for effective disease controls. Higher prevalence of disease outbreaks results in considerable market disruptions."
 
Texas, which is the U.S.'s biggest cattle producer with an industry valued at $8.4 billion, has a tremendous interest in making sure foot-and-mouth disease is eliminated from the Western Hemisphere, said Bob Hillman, executive director of the state's animal health commission.
 
"There is clearly an economic incentive to keep this disease out of our state," he said.