Foot-and-mouth disease is a viral disease that primarily affects cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. The disease poses no threat to human health, but infected animals suffer great pain, and their production of milk or meat is reduced. Most animals survive the infection, but may carry the highly contagious virus for a long time — hence the need to rapidly contain any outbreak through quarantine and the culling of both infected and healthy animals.
The EU has an extensive legal framework to control outbreaks, including trade restrictions on susceptible animals and their products. All Member States are obliged to have contingency plans. Cutting-edge state-backed laboratories must collaborate with the EU Reference Laboratory so that experts can help define the best emergency measures for each outbreak. The resulting culling and trade restrictions often cause heavy economic losses across the farming sector. Affected Member States can ask for EU compensation funds to be provided after the total costs suffered by the farmers and the sector’s supply chain have been calculated.
