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Aug 4, 2007

UK: Dreaded cattle disease strikes again

The dreaded foot and mouth disease is back to haunt the United Kingdom, six years after it first struck the country's livestock.

A cattle farm near Guildford in Surrey has reported a fresh outbreak of the disease at least 60 animals have already tested positive at the farm.

The administration has established a 3 kilometer protection zone around the farm and has ordered the monitoring of all animals in a 10 km radius.

The UK's cobra committee held an emergency meeting to discuss containment of the outbreak and PM Gordon brown cancelled his holiday to participate in the meeting by telephone.

In accordance with UK legislation all the cattle on the surrey farm will be culled and an immediate ban on the movement of all livestock within the UK has been imposed.

The last foot and mouth outbreak in the UK was in 2001 and resulted in major chaos.

Around 6.5 to10 million cattle had to be culled and cattle owners and other rural businesses lost over 8.5 billion pounds.

''The animals will be humanely slaughtered and disposed of by incineration, obviously no pyres no burning of carcasses, and we have a whole wide range of measures to identify what has happened.

It's very early stage in this. We need to determine where the virus has come from, where it might have spread,'' said Debbie Reynolds, UK Chief veterinary officer.

The disease in question

Even the slight mention of foot and mouth may give cattle owners sleepless nights but as far as humans go there is no reason for alarm.

Foot-and-mouth is a highly contagious viral disease, which affects cattle.

Symptoms include fever, lesions in the mouth and lameness. The disease only crosses the species barrier from cattle to human with great difficulty.

The disease in humans is mild, short-lived and requires no medical treatment.

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