Foot and Mouth Disease(FMD)
Many of you have or will be dealing with questions about Foot and Mouth Disease. Several states are gearing up with emergency action plans in case of an outbreak. As you all know, the last FMD outbreak in the US was in 1929. The following links are a brief listing of some major sites of FMD material.
The APHIS site contains a wealth of information on Foot and Mouth Disease. It can be reached at: http://www.aphis.usda.gov and select Animal Health. Click on the title Current Information on Foot and Mouth Disease or go directly there at: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/oa/fmd. Their factsheet is at http://www.aphis.usda.gov/oa/pubs/fsmd00.html and they have a great color brochure in Adobe Acrobat format with great information. It can easily be downloaded and printed off (use coated paper if you will be printing on both sides to prevent ink bleed) as a handout for producer meetings http://www.aphis.usda.gov/oa/pubs/brofmd.pdf
Some of the following are directly accessible off of the APHIS website. I am including a little descriptive information about each link.
- The AVIS consortium sponsors a website that has quite a bit of information about Foot and Mouth Disease. http://aleffgroup.com/avisfmd/
- APHIS has their own computer based training module available on the web for vesicular diseases. The training consists of 158 slides of text and photos of FMD and a comparison with other similar diseases. It can be reached at: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/ep/fad_training/VESVOL7/vesindex.htm
- The links to the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food provide a real wealth of information from daily updates about the disease spread in Europe to links to several excellent publications. Link to them at: http://www.maff.gov.uk for the main site or http://www.maff.gov.uk/animalh/diseases/fmd/ for the FMD section.
- Antec International Ltd. is a commercial company that manufactures and sells disinfectants. They have quite a few resources on their website for general biosecurity and a description of their products. You can download their entire website for offline browsing at a link from their main page http://www.antecint.co.uk/
- Antec International Ltd. has a good factsheet on cattle and dairy vehicle cleaning procedures. http://www.antecint.co.uk/main.livhaud1.htm and have a good description of biosecurity precautions at http://www.antecint.co.uk/main/fmdukpre.htm
- The Texas Animal Health Commission has some good resources on their website at http://www.tahc.state.tx.us/Production/FMD/index.html
- The BBC and Guardian newspapers provide an excellent source of current and archived information on the status of the FMD outbreak.
BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk
Guardian
at http://www.guardian.co.uk/
- The Maine Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Resources has a factsheet on their website on FMD at http://janus.state.me.us/agriculture/animals/FMDFactsheet031501.htm
- South Dakota State University website written by Dr. Bill Epperson, Extension Veterinarian. It provides a number of resources in response to basic questions about Foot and Mouth Disease. http://www.abs.sdstate.edu/ces/footmouth/
- Penn State has an information center for Foot and Mouth Disease questions. http://fmd.cas.psu.edu
- North Carolina web information on Foot and Mouth Disease. http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/agcomm/fmd/
- The University of California has an extensive website organized into an online media kit. There are links here to informational articles, experts on the disease and pictorial resources. Extensive links are listed on this site for just about any aspect of information on diseases. http://danr.ucop.edu/news/MediaKit/FMD/FMD.html
- USDA-APHIS Plum Island Animal Disease Center. http://www.arserrc.gov/naa/home/piadc.htm