Foot-and-mouth disease hits Vietnam's livestock

HANOI, May 19 (Reuters) Foot-and-mouth disease has broken out in about half of Vietnam, including areas bordering China, Laos and Cambodia, but only a fraction of the country's cattle and pigs are infected, officials said today.

Agriculture officials said the highly contagious disease, which is not communicable to humans, re-surfaced in cattle and pigs over the past month in 33 of Vietnam's 64 provinces.

''The situation is under control and not as dangerous as avian flu,'' said Vu Ngoc Tien, programme assistant at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Hanoi. ''There has not been a big number of cases detected so far.'' Only about 30,300 cattle and pigs were sick out of the Southeast Asian country's 8 million cattle and 25 million pigs, Vietnamese officials said.

Nevertheless, it has caused concern in an agriculture sector already hurt by avian flu and the government has approved a compensation policy for farmers who lose livestock.

The Agriculture Ministry on Tuesday banned the transportation of infected livestock and their products out of the infected areas and ordered provincial authorities to set up checkpoints.

Animals were sick in more than 10 central and southern provinces bordering Laos and Cambodia and also in three northern provinces next to China, the Agriculture Ministry said. China has warned importers not to buy livestock from Vietnam.

The air-borne virus causes severe weight loss in cloven-hoofed animals such as cattle, goats, pigs, sheep and deer. It spreads as livestock come into contact with the feed and water of sick animals or from vehicles used to carry them.

Foot-and-mouth disease spreads from one country to another by transportation of livestock, their unprocessed products and also frozen meat, skin, bones and milk. Vaccination is the only way of prevention and there are no specific drugs to cure the disease.

''If the disease is not stopped soon, the damages will not only affect the husbandry sector but also become serious economic losses,'' Agriculture Minister Cao Duc Phat said this week.

The husbandry sector contributed 3 per cent to Vietnam's gross domestic product of 53 billion dollar in 2005. Since late 2003 when avian flu hit Vietnam, hundreds of millions of poultry have been slaughtered, causing huge losses for farmers.

Foot-and-mouth has scared consumers, who have started buying more chickens and eggs from markets across Vietnam, which has had no cases of the H5N1 avian flu virus for six months.

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