Farmers in Pakistan race to vaccinate cows against ‘lumpy skin disease’
Farmers in Pakistan are rushing to save cows from a damaging pox disease that has swept across Asia in recent years and threatens to spread quickly during religious celebrations this month.
Lumpy skin disease could ravage herds and cause heavy financial losses, at a time when the economy is already groaning under price hikes due to the Covid pandemic and war in Ukraine.
Officials are attempting to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of animals before huge livestock markets are set up to sell sacrificial sheep, cows and goats for the Muslim holiday of Eid-ul-Adha, which is expected to start on July 9. The virus can kill or emaciate cows, leave their hides covered in disfiguring sores, and devastate milk production.
The disease does not affect humans, and experts said it is highly unlikely to evolve to do so. But its spread comes amid warnings that the world is entering a new “pandemic era”, where new viruses will increasingly spill over from animals to humans.
Lumpy skin disease has flared in Pakistan in recent months and hundreds of cases per day are being reported. Farmers have complained there is not enough vaccine, or they cannot afford it.
Muhammad Javid, a livestock dealer in Peshawar, said his profits were plummeting as the virus swept through animals he had bought to sell ahead of the Eid celebrations.
“Every year, I buy animals worth 50m rupees (£200,000) from Punjab province and sell here in markets for the sale of sacrificial animals. Of the 5,000 animals in my farm, over 500 have developed lumpy skin disease and 35 died. The cost of vaccination is just too high,” he told The Telegraph.
Officials have tried to reassure consumers that the meat of infected animals can still be eaten if properly cooked, but farmers said customers were refusing to buy livestock. Milk prices from infected herds have also fallen sharply.
Rafiq Shah, a farmer with a herd of 100 cows, said: “The outlets which used to buy milk from us aren’t paying the rates they did before.”
The disease is transmitted by blood-sucking insects and ticks and health officials fear it will spread quickly through the markets where animals are brought together.
An epidemic ‘under the radar’
Dr Pip Beard, an expert on the disease for the World Organisation for Animal Health, said: “It is a really nasty disease and it causes significant weight loss and it takes a really long time to recover. Some farmers I have spoken to say they never really get back to where they were.”
Dr Beard, who runs a research team at the Pirbright Institute, said: “While the animal may not die, your production losses are really quite significant.”
The disease has long been in Africa and southern parts of the Middle East, but in the past decade or so has quickly spread further into Turkey, Russia, southern Europe and right across Asia.
“It's kind of the epidemic that has kind of gone under the radar,” said Dr Beard.
She added that researchers were investigating the possibility that the upheaval of the Arab Spring had contributed to spread of the disease, as veterinary services and controls broke down.
The disease is caused by a highly-specific and stable DNA virus which means it is unlikely to mutate so that it can infect humans.
Prof James Wood, head of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge, said lumpy skin disease was “a very feared trans-boundary livestock disease”, but said it was not a danger to human health.
“It is a poxvirus but does not have any close human infecting ‘relatives’,” he said.
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