The foot-and-mouth crisis is far from over, the Republic's veterinary bodies warned last night after a review of the threat to the State from continuing outbreaks in Britain.
Following a meeting with farming and other bodies in a Dublin hotel, the president of Veterinary Ireland, Mr Paschal Gibbons, said there could be infected sheep in the Republic.
"We are not out of the crisis yet and this is such a difficult disease to diagnose, it could be missed, even by the experts." Mr Gibbons said even three weeks after the first outbreak in Britain and a fortnight after the Meigh case, people in the Republic should be aware that "the crisis is far from over".
He urged farmers to inspect their sheep at least twice a day to check for signs of the disease and to err on the side of caution. "Because morbidity of this particular strain of the disease is very low, only a small number of sheep in a flock show clinical signs. It is important to check and re-check."
The Veterinary Ireland vice-president, Mr Sean O Laoide, said his organisation wanted all sheep around areas where there may have been contact with infected animals, "blood tested". This can provide a definitive diagnosis if an animal is infected.
"The danger is that a sheep could have caught the disease and recovered and that it could re-infect, later in the year, all the healthy animals," he said.
Mr Gibbons said the veterinary organisation had listened to the problems facing Irish farmers who now had a build-up of animals on farms. He acknowledged fodder shortages were looming and there was a risk of build-up of slurry.
"We are in agreement with the Department of Agriculture's regulations that animals must only be moved under permit. If the disease gets spread here, it will be spread from animal to animal first," Mr Gibbons said.
Farmers should now renew their defences against the spread of the disease, and they should consider making the disinfected mats and troughs permanent. "We must continue to operate as if the disease had entered the country and make sure those defences stay up."
However, said Mr Gibbons, they were pleased at the level of controls now in place at ports and airports.
Meanwhile, the number of confirmed cases of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK last night rose to 251, although there were no new infected areas, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food said. With the daily increase at 20 cases, there is no sign of the outbreak slowing down. The UK authorities hope cases will decline from next week.