Page 287 of articles about health

As of Tuesday, the foot-and-mouth epidemic has stricken 15 northern and central provinces of Vietnam.

The Korean government says it halted all imports of pork and poultry from Germany on Saturday after tests results showed high levels of cancer causing dioxin in animal feed. Meanwhile, Russia has announced it is tightening restrictions on meats imported from Germany.

The Russia Authorities have informed the European Union of a suspected case of African Swine Fever in Leningrad region (St Petersburg), near the EU border. Disease has been preliminarily confirmed by laboratory tests.

The incident started with the mixing of fatty acids, meant to be used for technical purposes (such as paper processing), with vegetable feed fat, which is used in the production of compound feed for animals. The fatty acids were contaminated with dioxins, and that is how the dioxins ended up in compound feed. The actual source of the dioxin contamination –i.e. why dioxins were present in the fatty acids– remains unknown for the time being.

The European Commission adopted last night urgent protection measures after a wild boar, which was shot by hunters at the end of 2010 in Bulgaria, tested positive to Food and Mouth Disease (FMD). The Commission's decision aims to reinforce control measures for FMD already taken by the competent Bulgarian authorities.

According to the OIE report, the German veterinary authorities have reported a new outbreak of Aujeszky's disease in two dogs.

The state of Lower Saxony said it would temporarily quarantine 1,000 farms with egg hens, pigs and turkeys until the Agricultural Ministry could ensure their products were safe for consumption.

The European Commission has sent a consignment of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) vaccine to Zambia in order to help the African nation's efforts in fighting an outbreak of the disease in the northern part of the country. The consignment consists of 80,000 doses of FMD vaccine.

South Korea on Monday decided to expand areas where vaccination will be administered in the face of the country's severest outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), the government said.

Taken into consideration that the last Classical Swine Fever case in Panevėžys County of the Republic of Lithuania was recorded a year ago the Rosselkhoznadzor lifted the temporary restrictions on import of live swine, pork and raw swine products into the Russian Federation from Panevėžys County of the Republic of Lithuania since December 21, 2010.

Bpex, the levy body, is to launch its latest pig health scheme in the East Midlands. East Midlands Pig Health (EMPH) follows in the footsteps of the Eastern Pig Health (EPH) and the Yorkshire and Humberside schemes.

The National Reference Laboratories for Salmonella and Antibiotic Resistance at the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) tested Salmonella isolates from diagnostic submissions for antibiotics resistance and assessed them according to epidemiological criteria between 2000 and 2008. The isolates originated mainly from animals and foods but also from feeds and the environment.

Today 92% of all U.S. swine premises have a nationally standardized premises identification number (PIN), as calculated by the Pork Checkoff using U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data representing 65,907 premises.

On 7 December 2010 the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the French Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l’alimentation, de l’environnement et du travail (Anses) and the Food Institute of the Danish Tekniske Universitet (DTU) signed a cooperation agreement. The objective of the German-French-Danish cooperation is to render the joint activities in the field of food safety, also on the European level, even more effective and efficient than in the past.