South Korea reported on Thursday another outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in a local cattle farm, about a week after the first outbreak in eight years, Xinhua quoted the government as saying. The cattle farm, located in Pochen in Gyeonggi Province, about 45 kilometers north of Seoul, was only 35 kilometers away from the farm where the first outbreak was confirmed last week, Seoul"s Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said. The government plans to cull about 1,348 heads of livestock in six farms within 500-meter radius of the farm where the second outbreak occurred, it said. In order to prevent further spread, the government also plans to kill livestock suspected of having contracted the highly infectious virus, it added. The foot-and-mouth disease is a highly contagious and sometimes fatal disease that can affect cloven-hoofed animals including sheep and goats, while humans are hardly affected by the virus. The recent spread of the disease comes eight years after the country suffered the outbreaks in 2000 and 2002, respectively, which caused a fall in dairy exports.
