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Officials in Argentina have confirmed that at least one case offoot-and-mouth disease has been found there. Argentina is the world’s 4th largest beef-producing nation, and provides the beef that supplies many U.S. fast food franchises.

The United States has banned imports of beef from Argentina and has expanded the ban on imports of livestock and fresh meat to include all 15 members of the European Union, after a case of foot-and-mouth was found in France.

The European Union has expressed dismay over this blanket ban. “Thirteen EU states are disease-free. We have measures in place to keep it that way,” says spokeswoman Maeve O’Beirne.
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Reports that 22 million Monarch butterflies were killed by being sprayed with pesticide have been greatly exaggerated, according to the World Wildlife Fund and American Monarch researchers.

“It’s been overblown,” says Monica Missrie, Monarch butterfly coordinator for the WWF in Mexico City. “It was probably two or three million.”

Homero Aridjis, head of the environmental lobby Group of 100, told reporters he believed that loggers has sprayed the migration areas of the Monarchs with pesticides in order to reopen their sanctuary to logging.
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Britain’s blazing foot and mouth funeral pyres risk giving people the human form of Mad Cow Disease, the British government admitted.

The carcasses of animals found to have hoof and mouth disease are being burned in order to stop the spread of the disease to other livestock. However, there is a risk that the smoke from these fires may spread the prion that causes both BSE and CJD and that these prions may also get into the water supplies. There is also the risk that E.coli and salmonella could be released.

Joyce Quin, an agriculture minister, has admitted that there was a possibility that “small numbers” of the cattle “may be in the pre-clinical stage of BSE and may harbor some of the BSE agent.”
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The French government has lost its long battle to keep Hoof-and-mouth disease out of France. The first confirmed cases were reported there today.

France has slaughtered tens of thousands of animals that were imported from Britain before the disease was discovered there, trying to keep the disease at bay. The sick herd found today on a farm at Mayenne in northwestern France, is the first anywhere on mainland Europe to have caught the highly contagious disease.
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