A leading government official in Hungary has told journalists the country has not ruled out a ‘biological attack’ as the possible source of the country’s foot-and-mouth disease outbreak.
According to a report by Reuters, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas told a media briefing that he could not rule out that the virus outbreak was the result of a biological attack, without giving information on who might be responsible.
“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,” he said.
He said that suspicion was based on verbal information received from a foreign laboratory and that their findings have not yet been fully proven and documented.
Hungary’s first FMD outbreak in more than 50 years was reported on March 7 at a dairy farm in Kisbajcs, in Győr-Moson-Sopron County, in western Hungary. Three more farms in Hungary have since had cases confirmed, alongside a number of farms across the border in Slovakia, resulting in the slaughter of thousands of head of cattle, the imposition of movement restrictions, export bans and border closures with neighbouring countries.
Hungary’s outbreak came months after FMD was confirmed in a small herd of water buffalo in January. Investigations continue into the origin of the outbreaks.
The Hungarian National Reference Laboratory has identified the virus as O serotype. Its sequence shows the highest similarity with a strain isolated in Pakistan in 2017-18 (98- 99%), but it differs from the strain detected in Germany two months earlier, according to the NFU’s BAB office in Brussels. The serotype for the Slovakian cases matches with the cases in Hungary, however.