British livestock hit by bluetongue disease

The outbreak has been a further blow to the Labour government and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, desperate to show it can deal with a series of crises including an outbreak of foot and mouth disease that continues to affect parts of the country.

Unlike the foot and mouth outbreaks, culling of affected animals is not an option in controlling the spread of the disease. It is only spread by midges and is not contagious—i.e., one animal cannot catch it directly from another.

Since it was first discovered, there are now more than 20 cases of the disease, with clusters around Ipswich and Lowestoft and one in the bordering county of Essex. A 20-kilometre control zone has been established around the outbreaks. It is likely that the midges arrived in eastern Britain from the Low Countries across the North Sea, carried by winds in late August.

Bluetongue was once considered a disease of the tropics and sub-tropics. It is endemic in many parts of Africa and was first described in South Africa in 1876. Outbreaks of the disease in the 1950s in the Middle East, Far East, China and Australia were thought to have originated from infected imported meat. In 1998, the virus began to enter southern Europe across the Mediterranean from Africa. It became endemic in Balkan countries, Greece, Portugal, Spain and southern France.