FMD Is Culling 25,000 Animals In Cyprus And Veterinary Teams Are Being Assaulted Trying To Stop It

The foot-and-mouth outbreak in Cyprus has crossed 15,000 culled animals. Farmers are fighting back, literally and the profession needs to understand what is at stake.

A foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Cyprus is escalating, and the veterinary teams on the ground are facing a crisis that goes beyond the disease itself.

Veterinary Services spokeswoman Sotiria Gregoriadou confirmed at a media briefing over the weekend that authorities have culled approximately 14,000 sheep and goats and around 1,100 cattle in an effort to contain the outbreak, with a further 10,000 animals expected to be destroyed as part of the response. The number of affected farms currently stands at 38, a figure Gregoriadou described as encouraging but fragile.

The warning was direct: that number can change quickly if farmers stop cooperating with containment protocols.

Veterinary professionals are being physically attacked

The detail that every member of this profession needs to sit with is this: veterinary teams carrying out legally mandated inspections and culling operations are being obstructed, confronted, and in some cases physically assaulted by farmers resisting the response.

Gregoriadou confirmed that several officials have been injured during confrontations while performing their duties. At least two have filed police complaints following incidents involving violent behavior.

This is not an abstraction. These are veterinarians and animal health officials doing the hardest part of this job — destroying animals that farmers have raised, often for years, in order to protect a national herd and prevent a disease that has no treatment from spreading further. The work is already devastating. Being met with violence while doing it is a failure of the systems that are supposed to protect the people executing public health policy.

It also delays the response. Every obstructed inspection is time the virus has to move.

What FMD actually means

Foot-and-mouth disease is one of the most contagious animal diseases on the planet. It affects cloven-hoofed animals — cattle, sheep, goats, pigs — and spreads with extraordinary efficiency through direct contact, contaminated equipment, clothing, vehicles, and even wind-borne transmission under the right conditions. It does not kill most adult animals, but it devastates production, causes severe welfare suffering, and triggers international trade restrictions that can economically cripple an agricultural sector for years.

There is no treatment. The response is surveillance, movement restrictions, vaccination, and culling of infected and exposed animals. It is blunt, it is painful, and it is necessary. Countries that have delayed or compromised their FMD response have paid for it in years of extended outbreaks and trade isolation.

Cyprus is an island, which provides a geographic containment advantage. That advantage disappears the moment the response loses coherence.

Where the response stands

The vaccination campaign is progressing but uneven. Gregoriadou reported that 73% of cattle farms have been reached but only about 35% of sheep and goat holdings — the species that make up the largest share of the culled animals and likely the most significant transmission risk given their numbers and movement patterns.

An advisory compensation committee established on March 5 is already preparing individual files for affected livestock producers. The government has outlined initial compensation of up to 50,000 euros for farmers whose animals have been lost, and the agriculture ministry is in contact with Spain and France about future imports of high genetic value animals once Cyprus is declared disease-free.

The compensation framework matters because farmer cooperation and financial security are directly linked. Farmers who believe they will be left without support are more likely to resist culling, hide animals, or move livestock before restrictions are enforced — all of which accelerate spread. Getting the compensation pipeline moving quickly is not just an agricultural policy decision. It is a disease control strategy.

The bigger picture for the global veterinary profession

FMD does not stay where it starts. The 2001 UK outbreak resulted in the slaughter of more than six million animals and cost the country an estimated eight billion pounds. The 1997 Taiwan outbreak wiped out the country's pork export industry for years. Every outbreak that is not contained quickly carries the risk of becoming something much larger.

For veterinary professionals watching from outside Cyprus, this outbreak is a reminder of several things that do not change regardless of geography: the critical importance of early detection and rapid response, the role of farmer trust and compensation infrastructure in making containment possible, and the very real human cost of being the person who carries out the work that saves the herd at the expense of the individual animal.

Gregoriadou's closing message to farmers was simple and worth repeating here: focus on the big picture. Failure to apply the measures strictly could allow the disease to spread further and prolong the crisis for everyone.

The veterinary teams on the ground in Cyprus already understand that. They are showing up anyway.

Source: Cyprus Veterinary Services media briefing, March 2026