Foot and mouth disease (FMD) has struck again in Taiwan -- attacking dairy goats for the first time ever -- prompting officials to order the slaughter of hundreds of animals and announce quarantine measures in Changhua County.
The new outbreak comes less than a month after agricultural officials downplayed two separate episodes of the deadly livestock disease and predicted it would be contained by the middle of this month.
Over 240 goats were destroyed at a dairy farm in Changhua County's Fangyuan township (
Twenty-two goats at the farm had already died of the disease.
Autopsies confirmed that the goats had died of the O-Kinmen strain of the FMD virus. Symptoms include white spots on the heart, open sores on the tongue and swollen lungs.
Council of Agriculture chairman Lin Hsiang-neng (
Changhua County's livestock disease control unit has placed a quarantine on the area, destroyed the farm's stock of goat milk and dis-infected the area to prevent spread of the disease.
The unit also set up an emergency task force which destroyed the farm's entire stock of goats yesterday afternoon. Vehicles and people entering or leaving areas within 3km of the infected farm will also be disinfected.
The unit is investigating neighboring farms for evidence of the disease.
The owner of the infected dairy farm told local quarantine officials that he had immunized his stock against FMD on Jan. 24, but did not immunize pregnant goats for fear of harming their unborn kids.
The first death from the disease came on Feb. 7, officials said, when a two-day-old goat died.
Local quarantine officials said FMD immunizations take several weeks to reach peak effectiveness, so contact with the virus may have happened between Jan. 24 and Feb. 7.
Outbreaks of FMD have inflicted serious damage among cattle and pig stocks across the country over the past three years.
Just last month, outbreaks of the virus were reported in cattle stocks in Chiayi and Yunlin counties. Over 250 cattle were slaughtered and destroyed in that outbreak, which began sometime around Jan. 15 and was announced to the public a week later.
The Council of Agriculture then ordered all cloven-hooved animals -- pigs, cows, goats and deer -- immunized against the disease.
On Jan. 26, the council predicted that the mass immunizations would eradicate the disease by the middle of this month.
In June of last year, 158 cows on Kinmen and Tainan County were also affected by the disease. At that time officials said they suspected the outbreak was due to the illegal importation of infected animals from China, which also saw a large-scale outbreak last year.
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