Bluetongue virus heading this way
CHANGING weather trends and a shortage of vets could leave Ireland and the UK prone to dangerous new livestock diseases.
Bluetongue is the most worrying animal virus creeping across Europe, which could yet follow the spread of the foot and mouth virus from the UK to Ireland.
Deadly in sheep flocks, it also affects cattle and goats, but they usually carry the virus without showing signs of the disease. Humans are not affected — unless you are one of the farmers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France, surprised over the past year by a disease they had never before seen.
It also hit the earnings of Irish calf sellers and exporters in 2006, because of livestock movement restrictions in the Continental farming areas which take Irish calves for veal production.
Often found in Turkey and the Middle East, bluetongue had previously ventured no further into Europe than Greece, Italy, Spain, and the Balkan nations.
Scientists were confident that the northern Europe outbreak in 2006 would subside as temperatures dropped, and the winter killed off the midges which carry the virus. (However, it is known the bluetongue virus can lay dormant for up to a month in midges, when the temperature falls below 10 degrees Celsius.)
Then, in the middle of April, bluetongue reared up again, in the north of France.
The disease’s advance towards the English Channel is particularly worrying for those who believe that potentially devastating diseases can go undetected until they are well established in the UK’s livestock herd.
They include Dr Sandy Clarke, Scottish section secretary of the British Veterinary Association, who voiced his concerns last year over the steadily diminishing number of large animal vets.
Remote parts of Scotland, and areas inside the M25, in Essex, and in North Manchester have no large animal vets.
Vets are travelling over 100 miles to some farmers, out of a sense of obligation to the livestock, but more and more UK farmers may have to do without vets. As a result, a serious disease outbreak may not be detected until it is already established, and appears in an abattoir — which was the case with the devastating 2001 foot and mouth outbreak.
The World Organisation for Animal Health has highlighted the importance of having effective veterinary services for early detection of rapid response to an unexpected event such as the arrival of bluetongue.
Last year, researchers called on UK farmers to let them set up overnight light traps on agricultural land. Midges caught in the traps could be identified to determine their capacity to spread the bluetongue virus.
Epidemiologist Aline de Koeijer of the Central Institute for Animal Disease Control (CIDC) in Lelystad, the Netherlands, has speculated how it came to her country.
An imported zoo animal could have been infected; or an infected midge could have hitched a ride on an airplane (mosquitoes have occasionally spread malaria in this way).
But how the virus could have found its way onto farms in the southern Netherlands, where it was first detected on August 17, 2006, deepened the mystery.
Once introduced, the virus may have benefited from the warm weather, which speeds up its life cycle (July of 2006 was the hottest month on record in much of the continent)
