The occurrence of foot-and-mouth disease in the south-eastern tip of of Bulgaria is a localized event and authorities will do everything possible to isolate it, stated Minister of Agriculture Miroslav Naydenov.

Saturday Naydenov is on a visit to local town of Sredets, in which a temporary center for tackling the livestock disease has been established.

Over the course of the first three months of the year, a string of villages in the sparsely populated Strandzha Mountains bordering the Black Sea and Turkey were discovered to house FMD-infected animals.

Thousands of animals have been killed, threatening a central livelihood of poor residents.

"We will not let FMD spread to the rest of the country," vowed Naydenov Saturday.

He also added that in neighboring Turkey there are over a 100 FMD-infected sites, which makes the occurrence in Bulgaria hard to control.

"This specific FMD epidemic is spread by wild and not domestic animals. And since there is no way to control the movement of wild animals, we can have no guarantee that there will not be any new outbreaks locally," explained Naydenov.

We need your support so Novinite.com can keep delivering news and information about Bulgaria! Thank you!