Descriptive epidemiology of the 2001 foot‐and‐mouth disease epidemic in Great Britain: the first five months

Abstract

In February 2001, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) was confirmed in Great Britain. A major epidemic developed, which peaked around 50 cases a day in late March, declining to under 10 a day by May. By mid-July, 1849 cases had been detected. The main control measures employed were livestock movement restrictions and the rapid slaughter of infected and exposed livestock. The first detected case was in south-east England; infection was traced to a farm in north-east England to which all other cases were linked. The epidemic was large as a result of a combination of events, including a delay in the diagnosis of the index case, the movement of infected sheep to market before FMD was first diagnosed, and the time of year. Virus was introduced at a time when there were many sheep movements around the country and weather conditions supported survival of the virus. The consequence was multiple, effectively primary, introductions of FMD virus into major sheep-keeping areas. Subsequent local spread from these introductions accounted for the majority of cases. The largest local epidemics were in areas with dense sheep populations and livestock dealers who were active during the key period. Most affected farms kept both sheep and cattle. At the time of writing the epidemic was still ongoing; however, this paper provides a basis for scientific discussion of the first five months.

Epidemiological analysis of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (serotype SAT2) on a large dairy farm in Kenya using regular vaccination

“…In recent years, outbreaks have been described in several previously FMD-free countries including the UK (Gibbens et al, 2001;Gibbens and Wilesmith, 2002), the Netherlands (Bouma et al, 2003), Japan (Muroga et al, 2012) and South Korea (Park et al, 2013). These descriptions and subsequent risk factor studies have focussed primarily on farm-to-farm level transmission, since control policies have emphasised preventing the virus moving to non-infected holdings (Wilesmith et al, 2003;Ellis-Iversen et al, 2011;Muroga et al, 2013).…”

Distribution of cow-calf producers’ beliefs regarding gathering and holding their cattle and observing animal movement restrictions during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease

“…Studies of several past http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.prevetmed.2014.09.010 0167-5877/Published by Elsevier B.V. outbreaks of FMD have revealed that the size and severity of an outbreak are associated with many factors, such as: the time to detection of the introduction of the virus (Gibbens et al, 2001;Tomassen et al, 2002;Carpenter et al, 2011), the density of surrounding livestock and herds, the extent of early disease spread, the effectiveness of disease control measures (Ferguson et al, 2001;Tomassen et al, 2002;Wilesmith et al, 2003;Cottam et al, 2008;Bessell et al, 2010), the patterns of animal movements (Nielen et al, 1996;Bates et al, 2001), the initial species infected (cattle vs. sheep vs. pigs), and the characteristics of the virus itself (Barnett and Cox, 1999;Kitching, 2002;Alexandersen et al, 2003;McLaws et al, 2009).…”

“…During an outbreak of FMD, the primary control strategies used are movement restrictions and the rapid slaughter of infected and exposed livestock (Gibbens et al, 2001;. In some countries, the application of vaccination, with or without the subsequent destruction of vaccinates, has also been applied or explored (Bates et al, 2003;Perez et al, 2004;Kitching et al, 2007;Barasa et al, 2008;Estrada et al, 2008).…”

“…However, the most common mode of transmission involves the movement of infected animals followed by direct transmission to susceptible animals (Donaldson et al, 2001). Animal movements have been implicated as contributing to the extremely large magnitude of the epidemics in both the UK and Taiwan (Yang et al, 1999;Ferguson et al, 2001;Gibbens et al, 2001). The outbreak in the UK in particular was characterized by the widespread movement of animals through livestock markets prior to disease detection (Anderson, 2002), and some researchers have hypothesized that the movement of animals through markets is the factor most likely to be associated with an extremely large outbreak (McLaws et al, 2009).…”

Application of mouse model for effective evaluation of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine

“…The virus is highly contagious and infects cloven-hoofed animals all over the world [1]. FMDV outbreak causes enormous economic damage by infecting a broad range of farm animals [2][3][4][5]. There are seven serotypes of FMDV, namely serotypes A, O, C, Asia1, South African Territories (SAT) 1, SAT2, and SAT3.…”