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STARLING MOVEMENTS AND THE SPREAD OF FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE

Abstract

A CONNEXION between the erratic and inexplicable occurrence of foot-and-mouth disease and the movements of wild animals has been suspected for a long time, and in the annual Reports of Proceedings under the Diseases of Animals Acts, published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, frequent references are made to the possibility that certain outbreaks of disease were due to the presence in the infected area of unusually large numbers of such birds as rooks, gulls, or starlings. The first serious attempt to correlate the movements of birds with the spread of the disease appears to have been that of Stockman and Garnett1, but their work was strongly criticized, mainly from an ornithological aspect, by Thomson2. They did, however, make the valuable suggestion that the only obvious way in which the disease can be transmitted over large distances, often apparently in a very short time, is through the agency of birds, and their ideas have formed a basis for a new survey of the problem now in press in the Proceedings of the Royal Society3. This survey has been made possible by a study4 of the breeding behaviour of the British and Continental races of the starling, Sturnus vulgaris L., and it consists of a correlation of this new knowledge with an analysis covering nearly forty years of the records of foot-and-mouth disease in the British Isles and on the Continent.

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References

  1. Stockman, S., and Garnett, M., J. Min. Agric., 30, 681 (1923).

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  2. Thomson, A. L., NATURE, 113, 52 (1924).

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  3. Bullough, W. S., Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. (in the press).

  4. Bullough, W. S., Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. (in the press).

  5. Bullough, W. S., Ibid, 6, 225 (1942).

  6. Marples, B. J., J. Anim. Ecol., 3, 187 (1934).

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  7. Elton, C., Progress Report of the Foot-and-Mouth Disease Research Committee, 5, 379 (1937).

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BULLOUGH, W. STARLING MOVEMENTS AND THE SPREAD OF FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE. Nature 149, 683–685 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149683a0

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