Foot-and-mouth Disease: Global Status and Future Road Map for Control and Prevention in India

Abstract

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a transboundary, economically devastating and highly contagious viral disease of livestock, most importantly cattle, buffalo and pig. The disease also affects goats, sheep, wild ruminant species and elephants. The causative FMD virus is antigenically diverse having seven distinct serotypes and many variants within them. Being a single stranded RNA virus, it confirms the quasispecies nature with emergences and reemergences of different genetic lineages with altered antigenicity within the serotypes, making vaccination based control programme a high cost effective, time consuming and difficult to achieve. As per the OIE and FAO, the disease is a major threat to food security of the world, and particularly the countries having the disease are more prone to food insecurity. Further, FMD free status is an indicator of development, and all developed countries are free from it. The disease is endemic in India and three serotypes of the virus viz; O, A and Asia1 are circulating. Annual direct loss due to FMD in India has been estimated at Rs. 20,000 crores. Many countries in the world are now free from FMD with or without vaccination and presence of the disease in other neighboring countries is a major threat to them. Countries having FMD face trade barrier posed by FMD free countries, causing heavy economic loss to the livestock industry. Progressive control pathway has been developed by FAO for global eradication of FMD. Vaccination based FMD control programme is in operation in India which involves biannual vaccinations of all cattle and buffaloes in selected areas, regular active surveillance and antibody monitoring in vaccinated population with the objective of creating FMD free zones. At present, the disease occurrence, severity of the clinical disease and number of outbreaks have progressively and substantially declined in the control zones as a result of last 10 rounds of vaccination with an oil adjuvanted trivalent inactivated vaccine. In this review, FMD scenario in India and in the world is briefed. Besides, the measures taken for the control and eradication of this devastating disease is presented. Besides, the initial success achieved through the FMD control programme in India, a road map for the control and eradication of FMD at national level is discussed.