The Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) is investigating possible imports of livestock from the German state of Brandenburg, where the FMD virus has been found. Minister Femke Wiersma of Agriculture (BBB) wrote this on Friday evening a letter to the House of Representatives.
On Friday morning it was announced that three dead water buffalos in Brandenburg were infected with foot-and-mouth disease. It is the first time since 2007 that the highly contagious virus has been detected in a member state of the European Union. “I am shocked by this message and I am very concerned about an infection in the Netherlands,” Wiersma writes.
According to the minister, an initial risk analysis by the NVWA shows that no animals have been moved from the area to the Netherlands in the past six weeks, but there may have been “indirect imports”. If animals or products from Brandenburg ended up in the Netherlands via a detour, “then these companies will be blocked in the Netherlands and further investigated.”
FMD is highly contagious to cows, sheep, pigs and other soliped animals. They develop blisters and fever and 1 to 2 percent of infected animals die from the virus.
In 2001, an epidemic raged in Europe and hundreds of thousands of animals were culled preventively in the Netherlands. In 2007, the Netherlands imposed transport bans due to foot and mouth cases in England.