A case of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) was discovered late last month in Taoyuan County, the agency in charge of animal health reported yesterday.
The Council of Agriculture’s (COA) Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine said it received information of the case on Aug. 25, after a laboratory test revealed the presence of FMD.
Bureau officials collected the test sample from a wholesale pork market during a routine inspection, the bureau noted, and said it reported the case to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) on Friday after confirming that it had not affected other pigs.
The bureau said that upon learning of the case, it immediately asked the county’s animal health authorities to take necessary precautions at the farm where the pork originated to contain a possible spread of the virus.
The tests included an on-the-spot health examination of the pigs and taking samples for tests that all eventually proved negative.
At the same time, FMD vaccinations were given to pigs being raised on three nearby farms as a preventive measure, the bureau explained.
Results later showed that all pigs being reared on farms in the neighborhood are healthy. To stave off a fresh outbreak of the epidemic in Taiwan, animal health authorities resumed vaccinations of pigs aged between 12 weeks and 14 weeks — which are particularly vulnerable to FMD — beginning early last month.
Before the resumption of vaccinations, only sporadic FMD cases had been reported from different regions to the bureau over the past 12 months, but the bureau decided to re-impose the practice.
Until late last year, 90 percent of the pigs on 12,000 farms around the country had stopped receiving FMD vaccinations, moving Taiwan toward the zero-injection rate required by the OIE to be declared an FMD-free country, COA officials noted.
With the inoculation measure back in place, the officials said it will now take Taiwan several more years to achieve its goal of becoming recognized as FMD-free.
Taiwan had been listed by the OIE as an FMD-free member where vaccinations are used until February, when two FMD cases were reported in Yunlin and Changhua counties.
An OIE member must be free of FMD and must not have vaccinated any pigs against the disease for a period of at least 12 months to be declared fully FMD-free.
The disease first broke out in Taiwan in 1997 after the virus was brought into the country by pigs smuggled in from China. The bureau was forced to mandate the vaccination of all pigs to curb the disease from that year onward.
Taiwan now raises only about 6.4 million pigs a year, mainly for local consumption. The number represents a marked fall from the 12 million pigs raised in the country at the industry’s peak, when 7 million were exported to Japan annually.
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