Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/BAGHDAD: A severe, highly contagious livestock variant has plagued Iraq for decades, but this year’s outbreak has already had a devastating impact that veterinarians in Nineveh province describe as unprecedented.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, laboratory tests have identified the SAT2 variant of the viral disease. This strain, which has never been seen in Iraq before, is resistant to the vaccines commonly used in the country, leaving authorities scrambling to obtain the necessary doses to immunize livestock and prevent further spread.
Roumi, a 26-year-old farmer from the village of Badush near Mosul, the capital of Nineveh, lamented that the infection rate is much higher; there were between 20 and 25 cases in the village every day.
He tended to one of his ailing animals in his yard while chewing on some fodder in a basin. Along with the five buffaloes he has already lost, all of his buffaloes were vaccinated against the disease as part of a government campaign in 2021.
According to Roumi, the administered vaccines are ineffective, and foot-and-mouth disease has ravaged the herd.
Roumi, like many other farmers, has seen his only source of income threatened by the outbreak and exorbitant fodder prices. He used to produce a barrel of 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of milk per day, but now he only produces less than 25 kilograms.
This variant has no impact on humans
The disease is not dangerous to humans but is highly contagious among “cattle, buffaloes, sheep, goats, swine, and other cloven-hoofed animals,” according to the FAO. The UN agency said that the disease causes potentially lethal fevers and blisters, resulting in “high mortality in newborn and young wildlife, weight loss, reduced milk yields and lower fertility.
Affected animals become too weak to plow the soil or reap harvests, and farm owners cannot sell the milk they produce, threatening household food security.
The disease “resurges in intermittent waves,” according to Udai al-Abadi, director of a veterinary hospital in Nineveh, with the last peak in 1998. However, he stated that “infections are high and can be counted in the hundreds” this year in the province, compared with the dozens usually recorded.
He said that urgent requests for vaccines had been sent to the government in Baghdad, but the province did not receive its allocation of shots in 2022, though they could be purchased locally from private sellers.
