About the project

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and classical swine fever (CSF) are highly contagious diseases of livestock able to cause epidemics that can severely affect animal welfare and cause enormous economic losses. For this reason, FMD and CSF are included in the List A of the most important animal diseases of theWorld Animal Health Organisation (OIE). Both have been the subject of continuous eradication efforts in Europe and other parts of the world, throughout the last forty years. Despite successes, the diseases are still common in some countries, and global eradication remains a distant prospect. Meanwhile, growing international movements of people, animals and animal products make it increasingly difficult to prevent these diseases from gaining access to our fully susceptible livestock population. This has resulted in a number of terrible European epidemics, most notably those centred on The Netherlands in 1997/8 (CSF) and on the United Kingdom in 2001 (FMD). These have been very costly and have led to the slaughter of millions of animals, a policy which is increasingly abhorrent to the general public, especially when dealing with diseases that are not significant zoonoses. While past epidemics have been caused by natural, often illegal, introductions, the possibility that FMD or CSF, and other List A diseases, could become a terrorist weapon to undermine the economy is now considered a more likely scenario in North America, and such a possibility should also be considered in Europe. Certainly its use by terrorists would change the first appearance of the disease, making it more probably a multi-centre and possibly, in the case of FMD, a multi-serotype outbreak, which will have implications for all aspects of preparedness and contingency planning.

The difficulty of keeping these diseases out of our borders and of controlling their spread amongst our fully susceptible, densely populated and highly mobile livestock populations has led to the reappraisal of the stamping out approach. In the case of FMD, a new EU Directive has been drawn up and greater emphasis is placed on the use of vaccination to control future outbreaks. However, the policy of vaccination rather than slaughter to control diseases such as FMD is not without problems.

CSF was considered an infection at the brink of eradication in the EU at the end of the 1980s. Prophylactic vaccination against the disease was completely stopped by the end of 1990 in order to achieve a common disease-free status in all member states. Instead of vaccination strict control measures were applied, e.g. killing of infected, suspect and contact animals and movement restrictions. Thus, more than 15 million pigs had to be killed during a series of severe CSF outbreaks in the 1990s. Emergency vaccination has never been used in these epidemics. As mentioned above eradication of millions of animals has to be considered very critically.

In principle, Council Directive 2001/89 of the EC allows the use of emergency vaccination using either modified live vaccines or sub-unit marker vaccines in emergency situations. However, the use of marker vaccination was hampered by the lack of reliable accompanying assays. Recently, a new discriminatory ELISA assay has been approved of by the European Commission, so that now marker vaccines and accompanying tests are available. Thus, new (vaccination) strategies for the control of outbreaks of CSF in domestic pigs have to be thought of.

Ideally, better vaccines and better diagnostic tests are needed, more information is required on many aspects of vaccine performance, better global surveillance and risk analysis would help us to choose which vaccines to stockpile, and new modelling tools could help with the difficult decisions as to which variant of a particular control policy to use. In other words, a considerable research effort is justified to improve on the current situation.

It is also important to realise that Europe is not the only part of the world facing these problems. South America has a large beef industry and has long experience of using vaccination to protect itself against FMD. Nearer to Europe, in Turkey, FMD is still endemic, but vaccination is being used to help bring about the eradication of the disease. In these countries, not only is valuable research being conducted, but there is also an enormous amount of expertise in the use of FMD vaccines, something that is lacking in Europe, where FMD vaccination has hardly been performed in the last 15 years.

Ultimately, the best way of protecting Europe against FMD and CSF is to control them elsewhere at their endemic sources. Without a more global approach, it is most unlikely that these diseases can be controlled, let alone eradicated. A global approach would benefit both Europe and other countries and would build a framework for the control of other significant livestock diseases.

Unfortunately, the critical mass of scientific effort dedicated to improving the control of diseases such as FMD and CSF is small and is highly fragmented, both geographically and by discipline. For example, within Europe, control policy is unified by guidelines enshrined in statute, but the degree of preparedness for disease control varies between member states. Work on these diseases can only be carried out in extremely expensive high containment laboratories. Consequently, scientific expertise is highly dispersed and each nation tends to support its own limited laboratory facilities and disease consultants. These tend to function with insufficient interaction between one another and with the wider scientific research community, where complementary expertise, for example in risk analysis, may be found (see recently published EU SCAHAW report, April 2003, p. 110). Further afield, the same uncoordinated and often shallow effort may be duplicated in other parts of the world, whilst cutting edge research activities may be almost completely lacking or ignored by the official bodies. It is obvious that this is not an efficient model for internationally effective use of resources with regard to research to support EU policy. Much expertise already exists on these diseases, the viral agents which cause them, the diverse husbandry and economic factors that facilitate their spread, etc, but it is not readily accessible. An improved co-ordination of FMD and CSF research and other activities (surveillance, mutual recognition of diagnostic results, antigen banks, etc) is therefore urgently needed (see UK Royal Society Enquiry on FMD, SCAHAW and European Parliament FMD Commission).