What is Foot and Mouth Disease?

Foot and Mouth disease may sound like a condition commonly contracted by politicians. If such an illness did exist it would be more approrpriately called foot-in-mouth disease. Foot and mouth disease, also called Hoof and Mouth disease affects livestock. The sometimes fatal disease most commonly affects cows and pigs. It can also affect deer, goats, sheep, other bovids with cloven hoofs, hedgehogs, rats and elephants.

Foot and mouth disease was first identified in 1897 by Friedrich Leiffer. Leiffer found that blood of an infected animal that had been passed through a porcelain filter still had the power to cause the disease in healthy animals. While many parts of the world have not seen a case of foot and mouth for many years, the disease spread rapidly after World War II. New Zealand is one of the few countries where a case of foot and mouth disease has never been reported.

It can take between three to eight days for the symptoms of foot and mouth disease to appear in an infected animal. Once the disease takes its course its symptoms are a high fever that decline rapidly after two or three days, blisters in the mouth that leads to excessive scretion of stringy or foaming saliva, drooling, and blisters on the feet that can rapture and cause lameness.

It is possible for humans to come down with the foot and mouth disease, but that is rare and happens only when the human spends an extended period of time in the company with infected livestock. Breakouts of the disease usually require mass slaughter of the infected herds and a loss of profit to farmer.