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Growing Resistance
Throughout Europe
FMD Debate Finds Echo in Switzerland
by Franz-Josef Sager, press officer of the NBKS grassroots organisation
The foot-and-mouth
disease (FMD) has been widely discussed in the Swiss media in the past couple
of months. At first the focus was on the events and latest figures in the
UK and the EU. The discussion has now increasingly turned towards the fundamental
questions of livestock farming practices today and meat consumption.
The last major FMD epidemic in Switzerland that broke
out before World War II spread across most of the country affecting the majority
of animals. For a few days the animals were ill, they produced somewhat less
milk and then recovered. One of the biggest problems was the amount of time
it took to nurse the animals back to health and the fact that in the period
after their recovery so many still births occurred.
During the epidemic of 1967, all of the infected animals
were culled. Periodical re-inoculation of animals in Switzerland have secured
that the country has been free of FMD apart from a few isolated cases in
the early eighties. For this reason the majority of Swiss farmers could never
understand why vaccinations were stopped in 1990 in acquiescence of the EU
vaccination ban, which was introduced in 1991.
The Swiss Federal Veterinary Office claims this policy
is for economic reasons: As soon as vaccinations are introduced, a country
loses its ‘FMD-free’ status – according to EU definition. Switzerland profits
from this status because it can still export its dairy products (cheese) to
the USA, unlike EU-countries.
This is a flimsy argument because here in Switzerland
BSE has meant that they would rather kill off ‘superfluous’ cattle to relieve
the meat market, even though meat and milk from FMD-FMD-infected animals
is safe for human consumption.
The Federal Veterinary Office has now set up a whole catalogue
of measures to protect our country from the FMD threat. In pure and simple
terms this could mean precisely what our grassroots groups and the majority
of informed consumers have been demanding for so long: foodstuffs should
be produced by local farms and then marketed in that same region. The logic
of such a step lies in the fact that diseases and epidemics like BSE and
FMD have managed to spread world-wide as a consequence of increasing globalisation
of food markets and the industrialisation of livestock farming.
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