OWN CORRESPONDENT AND AFP, Durban | Saturday
THE outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the Kwazulu Natal Midlands – which has seen six countries imposing bans on South African meat and livestock – has spread to a neighbouring farm in spite of desperate efforts to contain the disease.
A cow tested positive for the highly infectious disease on a farm adjacent to the pig farm where the disease was first identified last week, the KwaZulu-Natal department of agriculture has confirmed.
The result is the first to emerge from a property outside the farm where 700 pigs were destroyed last week as a result of the outbreak. The discovery will see about 60 head of cattle on the newly-infected farm destroyed.
Earlier this week, officials said they were hopeful the outbreak had been contained after a strict quarantine zone was set up around the farm.
The agriculture department’s senior animal health inspector, Gideon Brueckner, will travel to Paris next week to brief the international regulatory body, the International Office of Epizootic Diseases (OIE), on the outbreak, officials said.
Singapore, Botswana, Namibia, Mauritius, Mozambique and Swaziland have all applied bans of various severity on South African meat or livestock as a result of the outbreak of the highly infectious viral disease.
The virus apparently came from swill bought from a ship in Durban harbour. It has been typed as 97 percent similar to a strain identified in Saudi Arabia in 1994 and Bangladesh in 1997, with the result that South Africa is now reviewing its own imports from Asian countries.
The OIE revealed that foot-and-mouth had also been recorded in Mpumalanga province after infected buffalo were taken outside the Kruger National Park, where foot-and-mouth is endemic, but where there is no commercial farming.
The main concern here is how the big markets in the European Union, Switzerland and the Middle East will react.
“At the moment, our biggest fear is probably reaction from the EU,” South African Meat Industry Company export development manager Gerrit Bruwer told Business Day newspaper in an interview.
Some 120 veterinarians are testing animals near the infected farm.