TAIPEI -- Authorities in Taiwan's Kinmen County have culled 176 cattle after detecting several cases of foot-and-mouth disease.
Local authorities issued a ban on Thursday on the transport and sale of all cloven-hoofed animals, as well as fresh and processed meat products from Kinmen. All cloven-hoofed animals within a radius of three km have been subject to testing.
A carcass at a slaughterhouse tested positive for foot-and-mouth disease during a routine inspection by Kinmen's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection in late March.
Local authorities then traced the infected animal back to a farm with 176 cattle, where two of 15 cattle sampled tested positive for foot-and-mouth last month. Initial analysis suggested the animals had the disease's A-type strain, which is new to Taiwan.
Kinmen has nearly 600 cattle farms and over 6,500 cattle. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth with the O-type strain was reported there three years ago, and the O strain was reported in pigs in 1998 and 1999.
