BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany has not found any further cases of foot-and-mouth disease, agriculture minister Cem Oezdemir said on Wednesday, adding that experts were working day and night to establish the source of the country’s first outbreak of the disease in decades.
“The most important task now … is to ensure that we get this disease under control,” Oezdemir told reporters in Berlin.
The government is also working to keep export markets open for German meat and dairy produce, especially in the European Union. This depends on no more cases being found, Oezdemir said.
Germany announced the country’s first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in nearly 40 years on Jan. 10 in a herd of water buffalo on the outskirts of Berlin in the Brandenburg region.
The disease hits cloven-hoofed ruminants including cattle, pigs, sheep and goats and in past decades needed major slaughtering campaigns to eradicate. Measures to contain the highly infectious disease, which poses no danger to humans, often involve bans on imports of meat and dairy products from affected countries, with Britain, South Korea and Mexico among countries imposing import bans on Germany this week.
Germany’s government said on Wednesday it had been informed that the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, had decided Germany’s action to impose quarantine zones of about 10 kilometres (6.21 miles) around the farm where foot-and-mouth was discovered is sufficient to permit the use of the “rationalisation” trade principle.
Under this rule, imports of meat and dairy products are only restricted from the region where the disease has been confirmed and not from the whole of the affected country.
“We have now managed thank God, to reach the first step of an agreement with the European Union and make it clear that rationalisation applies,” Oezdemir told reporters.
“But the precondition of this is that we do not have any more cases of foot-and-mouth disease.”
German authorities are working day and night to find the source of the outbreak and how the infection managed to get into Germany, the minister said.
(Reporting by Rachel More and Michael Hogan, Editing by Miranda Murray and Louise Heavens)
