South Korea on Monday reported one more case of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in the southeastern part of the country, according to Seoul's Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The ministry said that the new case of the highly contagious disease was found in a cattle farm in Uiseong, North Gyeongsang Province. The ministry, which had established a precautionary quarantine area around the farm, said it has ordered all cattle at the affected farm to be culled and buried along with all cloven-hoofed animals within a 500-meter radius. So far, a total of 147,173 heads of livestock from 628 farms have been destroyed with an aim to prevent further spread of the disease, Xinhua reported. The FMD is a highly contagious and sometimes fatal disease that can affect cloven-hoofed animals including pigs, sheep and goats, while humans are hardly affected by the virus. South Korea reported its last outbreak of the animal disease in April, three months after the country reported its first outbreak of the disease since 2002. The country was cleared free of the disease on Sept. 27 by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). The country previously suffered such outbreaks in 2000 and 2002, which caused a fall in dairy exports.
