Vaccination should be used as a “tool of first-resort” against foot-and-mouth outbreaks, rather than a secondary safety net, the European Parliament’s temporary committee on foot and mouth disease has concluded in its preliminary report.
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Followung a series of hearings, the committee’s rapporteur Wolfgang Kreissl- Dörfler said that the EU’s current policy of “stamping out” outbreaks by culling livestock known or likely to be infected “cannot continue in its present form.” He claimed that the current anti-vaccination policy assigns “undue priority to trade-policy.”
Meanwhile, Kreissl-Dörfler’s first report has also called for a “zero tolerance” import policy to ensure that “not a single kilogram of meat from an FMD-endemic country enters the EU”.
