Beyond the farm

摘要

In 2002, Newcastle disease spread rapidly through chickens in Los Angeles, California. More than 6,500 poultry died in the effort to control the outbreak. "It took virtually the entire available veterinary staff at the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] to isolate and eradicate the disease in three months," says Alan Kelly, dean emeritus of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He fears that if highly infectious foot-and-mouth disease ever reached the United States - it hit the United Kingdom in 2007 and Japan in 2010 - the nation might not have enough veterinarians to contain it. The trend towards hot summers in some areas could exacerbate viral epidemics, providing favourable conditions for the spread of zoonotic diseases such as West Nile virus and hantavirus.