INCIDENCE OF FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE.

New Zealand Journal of Agriculture, Volume XXXI, Issue 6, 21 December 1925, Page 394

INCIDENCE OF FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE.

In the report of the departmental Committee appointed by the British Government to inquire into foot-and-mouth disease in Great Britain, and published earlier in the year, the following important statement occurs :

We are bound to agree with the view that there was something in the nature -of : the virus met with in this outbreak to account for the large number of cases of recurring outbreaks. There is little doubt that this outbreak has demonstrated conclusively that the opinions previously held as to the normally short period for which the virus is capable of living outside the animal body must be drastically revised.

This statement strongly emphasized the necessity for even greater care than had hitherto been thought necessary. ’ Incidentally, some confirmation of it can be found in the fact that an outbreak occurred in California in April of this year on a farm where evidently no previous cases had occurred for some months previously. The following extract from the report of the same Committee indicates that the conditions prevailing in dairying districts in Britain were specially favourable for the dissemination of foot-and-mouth: — .

. It is generally agreed that the virus of disease met with in this outbreak remained active for a period far exceeding anything experienced in. previous outbreaks, whilst the conditions prevailing in Cheshire were exceptionally favourable to the spread of infection. For example(a) The heavy milking-stock carried on ■comparatively small contiguous grass farms ; (&) the absence of natural barriers—e.g., large tracts of arable land, woodlands, hills, &c. ; (c) the necessity for daily movement of milking-stock from buildings to pastures ; (d) the necessity for daily handling of milking-stock ; (e) the visits of milkers resident away from the farms and probably keeping a few animals on their own premises ; and (/) the presence of faulty systems of drainage, and the lack of adequate fences between fields.

With the exception of (e), these conditions are also found in the dairying districts of New Zealand.