On a sultry evening in May, 42-year-old Jaffar Abbas wore a distressed look as he sat on a charpai outside his cattle pen near Murid village in Punjab’s Chakwal district. He had just lost two cows and four calves, reducing his cattle count by half, amid a fatal outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). 

“Do you know what losing a cow means for a small farmer?” he asked Eos, before answering the question himself. “It means losing the source of his income, which keeps him and his family alive throughout the year,” he continued. “The death of my two cows and four calves has shattered me, as I have suffered a loss of more than 14 lakh [Rs1.4 million].”

Abbas is one of many small and large cattle owners who lost valuable livestock to FMD, as the contagious disease wreaked havoc across the Punjab from April to mid-June this year. While the Livestock and Dairy Development (L&DD) Department Punjab says that the disease affected 5,000 cattle across the province, the actual number is believed to be much higher.

This is because farmers often opt for private veterinarians and use traditional treatments instead of reporting cases to the livestock department, due to concerns over the competence of their veterinarians.

A lethal new strain of Foot-and-Mouth Disease has left farmers in Punjab reeling, with cattle dying in alarming numbers. As the government scrambles for solutions, small farmers bear the brunt of a crisis that often leads to their ruin…

A LONGER AND LETHAL OUTBREAK

The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) defines FMD as “a severe, highly contagious viral disease of livestock”, which affects cattle, goats, sheep, swine and other cloven-hoofed ruminants. It is characterised by fever and blister-like sores on the tongue and lips, in the mouth, on the teats and between the hooves. The disease causes severe production losses and, while the majority of affected animals recover, the disease often leaves them weakened and debilitated.

But this year, the disease — which is characterised as having a very low mortality rate, of between one to five percent in adult animals — killed scores of adult animals across Punjab, while calves — with a mortality rate of around 20 percent — could not survive even mild attacks.

In the past, FMD was known to last between two to three weeks. This year, it has affected cattle for two and a half months. The affected animals, the ones that managed to survive the disease, are still reeling in the disease’s aftershocks, with pregnant cows and buffaloes aborting or giving births to dead calves, producing decreased milk and animals often limping afterwards.  

Dr Muhammad Riaz, who was previously with the livestock department in Chakwal and is one of the most sought-after veterinarians in the district, tells Eos that he attended to more than 200 cases of FMD from April to June. “I have never witnessed FMD in such lethal form in the past,” he says. “Usually, the mortality rate in adult animals used to be hardly one percent in the past but, this year, the disease has killed them in [large] numbers,” he says.

EMERGENCE OF A STRONGER STRAIN

The director general of the L&DD Department, Dr Muhammad Ashraf, contends that the intensity of the disease is a cyclical affair, with the increase in intensity witnessed every four years.

In fact, there has been a resurgence of the FMD virus that has baffled veterinarians around the world.  In its latest report, WOAH reveals shocking details of global animal health, with re-occurrences of FMD in 14 countries, including Germany, Hungary and Slovakia, after decades. The report notes that a new strain of FMD virus is threatening global food security.

For example, this year, Germany has witnessed an FMD outbreak after 37 years, while Hungary is grappling with an FMD outbreak reported after 50 years, with the authorities ordering the culling of 4,000 animals to prevent the virus from spreading. The United Kingdom has banned the import of meat and dairy products, as the world struggles to trace the origin of the new virus strain.

According to Dr Rashad Munir Khwaja of the FMD Research Institute in Lahore, Punjab witnessed 670 outbreaks of FMD between December 2024 to May 2025, which has affected 5,000 animals so far. “The current wave is caused by a new strain of virus, which could not be remedied by vaccines imported from Turkey and Russia,” he tells Eos.

The institute has since sent 30 samples to the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, which is a leading centre of excellence in the research and surveillance of viral diseases of livestock and viruses that spread from animals to humans.

At the same time, reveals L&DD Department’s head Dr Ashraf, Pakistan has acquired a consignment of three million doses of the FMD vaccine from Turkey for Rs800 million. This has allowed the department to carry out ring vaccination, a disease control strategy where vaccination efforts focus on the contacts of confirmed cases, creating a “ring” of immunity around the infected animal. “We cannot opt for carpet [mass] vaccination across Punjab, as there are more than 56 million adult animals in the province,” maintains Dr Ashraf.

PIECEMEAL SOLUTIONS

Finding a solution to combatting and curtailing FMD outbreaks in Pakistan can be complicated. The country shares borders with India, Iran and Afghanistan, making it prone to the transference of viral diseases occurring in its neighbouring countries, as animal trade — both legal and illegal — continues across borders.

Furthermore, Punjab is the only province that is proactively trying to tackle the disease, having set up the research institute in Lahore, which also produces vaccines. It had plans to set up a state-of-the-art plant for the production of the FMD vaccine, which was to be completed at the cost of 44 million dollars, but “it never took off due to red tape,” says one high-ranking official at the L&DD Department, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Now, the project cost has gone up to 65 million dollars, or over 18 billion rupees,” he adds.

This new vaccine production facility was supposed to build on the efforts of the FMD Research Institute, which currently produces 10 to 12 million doses of FMD vaccine annually, while the actual requirement in the province is in excess of 100 million doses, the official adds. It is because the institute uses the cell culture technique to produce vaccines, which is outdated and cannot be used for large-scale production. “Producing vaccines on a large scale requires special technology and experts and we have neither,” the official laments.

Several officials suggested that paucity of funds shouldn’t be the reason to delay the setting up of a state-of-the-art vaccine production facility and that the government could co-opt the private sector into the project.

For the farmer, the availability of the vaccine is of primary importance to combat the disease which, if left untreated, can infect the entire herd and require mass culling. But that is rarely practised in Pakistan, where the overwhelming majority of the dairy sector rests on small farmers such as Jaffar Abbas, who wouldn’t be able to sustain a culling drive.

Still, small farmers caught up in the disease outbreaks are hurting, with Punjab’s livestock department estimating that FMD causes losses between six to eight billion dollars to the livestock sector annually. It has also resulted in restrictions on exporting beef from Pakistan, with only a handful of countries allowing its import from the country.

And for farmers such as Abbas, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without urgent action, each outbreak doesn’t just claim livestock, but livelihoods.

The writer is a member of staff. He can be contacted at nabeeldhakku@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 3rd, 2025