Budapest: Hungary suggested on Thursday a “biological attack” as a possible source of the country’s first disease outbreak in more than half a century, which has caused border closures and the massive slaughter of cattle in the northwest.
Hungary reported a first case of standing disease and mouth in more than 50 years in a farm of cattle in the northwest, near the border with Austria and Slovakia last month, said the World Organization for Animal Health, citing the Hungarian authorities.
Thousands of cattle had to be sacrificed while the country without a coast tries to contain the outbreak, while Austria and Slovakia have closed dozens of border crossings, after the disease also appeared in the southern part of Slovakia.
“At this stage, we can say that it cannot be ruled out that the virus was not of natural origin, we can be dealing with an artificially designed virus,” said Gergely Gulyas, the chief of cabinet of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Gergely Gulyas.
Answering a question, Gulyas said he could not rule out that the virus outbreak was the result of a biological attack, without giving information about who could be responsible.
He also said that the suspicion was based on the verbal information received from a foreign laboratory and that his findings have not yet been completely tested and documented.
The Hungary cattle stock had 861,000 heads based on a cattle census in December, little changed levels of the previous year. That constituted 1.2% of the total livestock stocks of the European Union, according to official statistics.
The disease of the feet and mouth does not pose danger to humans, but it causes fever and blisters in the mouth in ruminants fucking such as cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, and the outbreaks often lead to commercial restrictions.
Gulyas told journalists that a fresh outbreak has not been detected, and that the authorities were taking continuous samples.
