Monday, April 23, 2001
On wings of song
BTE observes its 25th anniversary by evoking the spirit of Malcolm X
Promotions approved for 157 UGA faculty
Tenure approved for 73 UGA faculty
Members of promotion, tenure review committees are announced
Right back at ya
Questions&Answers
Outbreak
By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

Corrie Brown is a pathologist at UGA’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Columns spoke with her about the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe.

Columns: Let’s begin with an explanation of foot-and-mouth disease.
Brown: The animal inhales the virus, it replicates in the lung, and then goes to the feet and the mouth, where it causes blisters. The animals are very lame--they don’t want to walk. Their mouths are incredibly sore. They don’t eat; they don’t drink. During that period, when they have a fever and blisters, they lose a lot of weight. That’s about three weeks of lost production. Then they recover.
Now in this country three weeks of lost production is all it takes to wipe out profits. We push our pigs to get to market weight at six months. If we have foot-and-mouth disease they’re not going to get to market weight until they’re seven months. With that much extra feed, nobody makes money. Either that, or supermarket prices go way up.
But the biggest problem is that no other country will buy our products. The export market dries up, and exports drive the domestic market. If we got foot-and-mouth disease it would probably cost us about $2 billion to clean it up, but it would be $20 billion in lost trade.

Columns: But humans don’t get it.
Brown: People can carry it in the back of their throat. It doesn’t get into the cells and so doesn’t infect you, but you can go a day later to a circus or a feed lot and sneeze and start an outbreak. But it’s passive.
If the naked viral particles are exposed to heat or sunlight or drying, they die in a matter of hours. But if they’re within something cool and moist, with some organic material, they can survive for quite a while. The virus can survive in a little piece of manure on the bottom of your shoe for probably a month.

Columns: Is this outbreak an example of globalization?
Brown: Today there’s an incredible amount of traffic of people, and animals, and animal products--so we’re at greater risk of foot-and-mouth disease coming in.
We’re also at a greater risk of it moving around, once it’s within the country, because of the way we raise our animals. Many cattle are born in one state, pastured in another, fattened in another, and slaughtered in a fourth. And in each of those places they can be exposed to a lot of other animals.

Columns: Is there any reason the disease would spread more quickly in Britain?
Brown: No--there’s nothing different about what happened in Europe compared to here.

Columns: Can you explain why the vaccine isn’t used?
Brown: There are a few reasons. One is that there are seven serotypes of foot-and-mouth disease. Let’s say serotype 1 gets in and we vaccinate with serotype 1. But serotype 2 could come in and infect all those vaccinated animals.
Another reason is that vaccinated animals can still get infected--they might not look sick, but they would pass the disease on.
And then the third reason--the biggest reason--is that no country is going to buy our products. There’s no way to tell whether animals with antibodies against foot-and-mouth disease got them from the virus or from the vaccine.
There is a fourth reason too. The vaccine is made from killed virus, and killed vaccines usually don’t generate immunity that lasts for very long, so you have to do it every six months. It’s expensive.

Columns: What hope do we have?
Brown: I think we can still aim for global eradication. That can be done with animal diseases. We were fairly close to eradicating foot-and-mouth from this hemisphere, until we had recurring problems this year, in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. And Europe was very close to eradicating it. If enough people work at it, it is possible to eradicate it.

Columns: Do you foresee any restructuring of the way we practice agriculture?
Brown: No, but I do see restructuring of our veterinary infrastructure. Over the past 10 years there’s been a steady erosion in the veterinary regulatory workforce--the people who are looking for these diseases--because we’ve been free of them for so long. Funding has steadily decreased. I think we’ll see more federal veterinarians, more awareness campaigns.
We’re making a lot of effort to globalize the veterinary profession here at UGA. We’re the first school to create a certificate in international veterinary medicine. I see an increased emphasis in global veterinary medicine. We really have to train our veterinarians to fill that niche. The secretary of agriculture calls agriculture the crown jewel in the American investment portfolio. It is 17 percent of all jobs, 14 percent of the gross national product--860,000 jobs, $140 billion in exports.
These diseases are going to come in. The amount of damage that they cause is directly proportional to the length of time before they’re diagnosed. In the United Kingdom, the virus spread for about a week before it was diagnosed. It was all over the place. In the Netherlands, they diagnosed the first case, they did the vaccinations, and it looks like they’ve gotten rid of it.
If foot-and-mouth disease comes in here--and it’s probably “when” rather than “if”--we’d better diagnose the first case. If we do, then we have a good chance of getting rid of it. If we don’t diagnose the first case then it could be economic ruin, like what we’re seeing in the United Kingdom.
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Published by University of Georgia News Service.
Beth Roberts, Columns editor; Juliett Dinkins, Columns managing editor;
Janet Beckley, Columns art director; Peter Frey, Columns photo editor.
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