South Africa on Wednesday rolled out a ten\u2011year drive to vaccinate nearly 20 million cattle as a fast\u2011spreading foot\u2011and\u2011mouth outbreak hits herds and squeezes key export markets.<\/p>\n
The highly contagious viral infection, also known as FMD, is not dangerous to humans but particularly affects ruminant livestock such as cattle, sheep, and goats.<\/p>\n
It causes fever, blisters in the mouth and near the hoof \u2013 and sometimes death.<\/p>\n
The outbreak began in 2021 and has since spread to all but one of South Africa’s nine provinces, Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen said, adding it has taken a “financial and emotional toll” on farmers.<\/p>\n
‘Many pleas for help’<\/p>\n
Since losing its status as an FMD-free country in 2019, “our farmers have faced unprecedented challenges,” he told reporters in Cape Town.<\/p>\n
“I have received many pleas for help from commercial to communal farmers, who have borne the heavy burden of the recent FMD outbreaks.”<\/p>\n
The plan, split into four phases, will see the government source vaccines from Argentina and T\u00fcrkiye, alongside supplies from next-door neighbour Botswana.<\/p>\n
Local production is also being ramped up, with a new line expected to start at 20,000 doses a week before scaling to a capacity of 960,000 doses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Africa on Wednesday rolled out a ten\u2011year drive to vaccinate nearly 20 million cattle as a fast\u2011spreading…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[131],"class_list":{"0":"post-23745","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-south-africa","8":"tag-south-africa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}