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The disease has the potential to devastate animal agriculture. An outbreak in the United Kingdom in 2001 caused an agricultural and tourism crisis costing more than €15 billion. Authorities slaughtered more than 6 million animals in efforts to eradicate the disease.
Germany also reported an outbreak in January that has since been contained.
Černý added that the virus was likely transmitted by accident and should be treated as such until proven otherwise.
“The virus can be carried on contaminated shoes, clothing, equipment, or even bird feathers from migratory species. Similar cases of unintentional introduction have been documented in the past,” he told POLITICO.
‘Engineered attack’
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of Cabinet, Gergely Gulyás, last Thursday became the first official to suggest the outbreaks could be the result of a biological attack.“At this stage, we can say that it cannot be ruled out that the virus was not of natural origin, we may be dealing with an artificially engineered virus,” Gulyás said at a press briefing, adding that the suspicion was based on verbal information received from a foreign laboratory whose findings have not yet been proven.Gulyás insisted that experts investigate any possibility of an “engineered attack.”Slovak Agriculture Minister Richard Takáč jumped on that bandwagon on Friday when he said in a YouTube interview that Slovakia is considering a similar possibility.“There are various speculations, various questions that we here in Slovakia are asking ourselves. The same questions are being asked by the European Commission as well,” Takáč said.“I can confirm that in official documents following meetings at the European level, bioterrorism is mentioned as one of the possible scenarios. That someone may have brought the virus here with a certain intent. It is the subject of an ongoing investigation,” he said.The Commission declined to comment on Takáč’s claim, but said it is working to figure out where the virus came from.
“We have no comment on this. The Commission is working closely with the member states to try to find the origin of the outbreak. Virus isolation and genome sequencing are ongoing at the EU reference laboratory and may help clarify the origin. We cannot speculate on either the timing or the outcome of that work,” a Commission spokesperson told POLITICO.A number of countries are taking precautionary measures, from neighboring Austria and the Czech Republic stepping up border checks, to the United Kingdom banning personal imports of meat and dairy products from the EU.
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