Talk:Foot-and-mouth disease

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Foot-and-mouth disease was a good article, but it was removed from the list as it no longer met the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.
Review: No date specified. To provide a date use: {{DelistedGA|insert date in any format here}}.

Because FMD rarely infects humans but spreads rapidly among animals, it is a much greater threat to the agriculture industry than to human health. Farmers around the world can lose billions of dollars a year during a foot-and-mouth epidemic, when large numbers of animals are destroyed and revenues from milk and meat production go down.

Todo

In many countries, the loss is not so much due to the disease itself. The disease has been stricking here and there for a very long time, and until a few decennies, movements of animals was very limited, so the disease couldnot spread really. When an epidemic occured, farmers just stopped moving animals for a while from one village to another for reproductive and sales issues.

The disease itself is spreading very quickly but usually does not lead to the death of the animal. The biggest issue is that cattle produced in one country is sometimes sold in another. European cattle is sold to the US for example, but the US is requiring the animals to be free from the disease and NOT vaccinated. Consequently, some european prefer to save the market by avoiding vaccination, but take the risk of epidemics. To avoid an epidemic spreading, the only option left, apart from vaccination, is isolation and preventive slaughtering. The money loss comes from the slaughtering due to market pressure, not so much from the disease itself.

Need to put that properly someday. user:anthere

I was quite appalled. I read the ministry's own website at the time, and if you were thorough you pieced together the admission it was all about the money, not health, not even human health. It was like torching a factory with everyone inside because some worker caught the sniffles. 142.177.24.141 17:50, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

We've got a redirect from 'Foo-bar-baz disease' to 'Foo bar baz disease', yet 'Foo-bar-baz' is used throughout the article. Which one are we going with as official? -- Rissa 21:32, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I made some minor edits - added to some stuff I know about vaccination and serotypes. I also took out the line about the vaccine developed in 1981 because it was dated (quite dated).

Please change redirect

This article should be at Foot-and-mouth disease with this entry redirecting there. -- postglock 13:34, 2 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Change/redirects done - worked out how to do it -- postglock 02:32, 4 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Delisted from GA

No refereces appear in article, so I'm delisting it. AndyZ 21:05, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stolen bio-weapon???

At what point was it confirmed that the 2001 outbreak was the result of a stolen bio-weapon? This is pure speculation on behalf of the Express. I have reworded it as such.

Removed the sentence -- it is non-encyclopedic tabloid newspaper speculation. "The Sunday Express has speculated that the foot and mouth virus was released deliberately out of Porton Down bio-weapons facility and could have possibly been the source of the outbreak two months later [1]." --mervyn 13:30, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

History of Disease

This article would benefit from having a section about the history of the disease. That is, its history as known to humanity. When was it first identified? How did it start or stop within natural populations of animals before vaccines, etc. The current information in the article is very "present-day" based, with little background beyond the discovery/proving that FMD was a virus in 1897. The disease was around long before that, affecting agriculture, but the article has no real information about that history. QwertyUSA 21:20, 6 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Animals being slaughtered: Real need fror clarification in the article

It is with dismay I learned (thanks to the contributing Wikipedian) that FMD was not a letahl disease and that most animals were recovering from it. Yet Millions have been slaughtered in the uk for fear of sprteading + there seems to be sopme damage limitation we could apply with cheap vaccination. The reason for slaughtering is commercial as some exporting countries will not accept vaccined cattle. This whole point is not made lear enough in the "Ethical" section. Will somebody please make this clear? If this doesn;t happen within a couple of weeks I will.

--81.170.116.178 12:45, 8 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The article says that the animals being raised for milk production could recover from the disease and live "normal lives," but anyone familiar with the lives of dairy cows would confirm that their lives are anything but normal. Perhaps this wording could be revised to be a little more objective. 151.191.175.230 18:37, 8 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]