The authorities have stepped up quarantine inspection at airports and customs to prevent a revival of the foot-and-mouth epidemic, officials said yesterday.
"Customs officials have tightened checks on disembarking passengers to bar entry of the virus," said Sung Hua-tsung, deputy director of the council's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine.
Quarantine inspections have been tightened on passengers arriving from infected areas, especially Britain.
Taiwan's airport authorities would also ask passengers from the contaminated areas to have their footwear sterilized at customs, Sung said.
Signs have been put up at local airports warning outbound Taiwanese passengers not to contact animals with hooves and not to bring back related products from the infected areas, he said.
Foreign passengers will also be asked not to visit local farms.
Taiwan, which has previously been affected by foot-and-mouth disease, does not import any kind of meat from Europe.
Last week, local authorities destroyed three hogs contaminated by the foot-and-mouth disease outside Taipei.
The three hogs were infected with the O-type virus, the same virus that led to the culling of 3.4 million hogs in 1997.
The mass slaughter caused NT$270 billion (US$8.34 billion) in losses to 100 related industries and slowed Taiwan's economic growth by 0.5 percent.
Sung said that the latest incidents "should be isolated cases" but he asked pig farmers to be on maximum alert against the disease, demanding that all the pigs be vaccinated.
Taiwan has pursued an intensive eradication campaign since the foot-and-mouth disease devastated its hog population in 1997, but isolated cases have been reported from time to time.
The 1997 outbreak forced authorities to slaughter a quarter of Taiwan's 14 million pigs and killed what had been a NT$49.6 billion-a-year pork export industry.
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