Apples for Health- Beagle Brigades Fight Foot And Mouth

Beagle Brigades Fight Foot And Mouth

U.S. efforts to keep foot and mouth disease at bay are going to the dogs, literally.

Beagle brigades, specially trained K-9 SWAT teams, are being used to inspect container vessels and airport luggage for undeclared food products from quarantined countries, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said at a briefing on the agency's efforts to prevent the spread of the disease to domestic livestock.

"The beagles have proven themselves to be just as effective, if not more so, than human inspectors," said Lee Ann Thomas, assistant director of USDA's Veterinary Medical Office. "This is especially true with container ships. Because of their size they can get deep inside containers."

Currently there are 59 teams of beagles in 23 locations around the country, but the agency has received money to increase the number of teams to 120. So effective have the beagle teams been, the agency has recently started recruiting larger dogs to inspect bulk containers, Thomas
said.

The dogs are just one part of a major effort by health officials to guard U.S. ports, airports and borders from foot and mouth disease contaminated foods and transmission by human travelers to affected countries in Europe. The USDA also is launching a program to more closely inspect railroad cargo from Canada and Mexico, Thomas said.

But no matter how many shipments by any route are ultimately inspected, it is impossible to monitor them all, she noted, especially with Internet sites offering specialty foods. In one instance, confiscated bottles labeled "fish sauce" ordered online were found to also contain pork.

"The problem with mail shipments is especially distressing around Christmas," Thomas said. "A lot of packages are shipped here from Europe, and many of these contain traditional foods, including cured meat products. If we see a package with cookies, then we'll almost always find a cured sausage, a prohibited product."

Foot and mouth can be contracted by humans, but the health effects are minor and infection is rare, noted Tom Gomez, a veterinary epidemiologist with USDA's Animal and Plant Inspection Service, or APHIS.

"There's very little risk to humans," he said, noting that only 40 cases have been reported in the medical literature since 1921. "Three patients have been diagnosed in the UK, but there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission, or infection from contaminated meat or pasteurized milk."

   "The USDA considers this a food security issue, not a public health risk," Gomez said.

   The day-long briefing, sponsored by the American Meat Institute Foundation, featured a dozen speakers representing various USDA offices and veterinary organizations.

He said people should not confuse foot and mouth disease with hand, foot and mouth disease, an unrelated human illness that most often affects young children during warm weather.

"Like foot and mouth, its symptoms include blisters on the hands and feet, on the lips and in the mouth. Often accompanied by fever and other flu-like symptoms, it is caused by the coxcksackievirus, any one of 30 enteroviruses found in the human intestines," Gomez said.

The big question is whether the United States is equipped to deal with an outbreak of the animal disease, should efforts to guard the borders fail, said Jack Shere, an APHIS inspector in charge of the state of Wisconsin. Shere recently returned from the UK, where he worked closely with health officials and military teams involved in quarantining outbreak areas and destroying contaminated livestock.

"Is the United States equipped to handle a sizeable outbreak?" he asked. "In the UK their response has been quick and thorough, but then they're used to outbreaks of other animal diseases like hog cholera and Mad Cow disease. They have a passport system so that the location of every head of cattle is known at any time."