An employee sprays formic acid on a decontamination carpet at the Austro-Slovace Border crossing point, Burgenland, on April 7, 2025. Credit Line: Alex Halada / AFP / Profimedia
Hungary cannot exclude that the epidemic of aphthous fever that caused the borders to close and the mass sacrifice in the northwest of the country to be the result of a “biological attack”, said the cabinet of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Gergely Gulyas, according to Reuters and News.ro.
Hungary reported, last month, the first case of aphthous fever in the last 50 years at a northwestern cattle farm, near the border with Austria and Slovakia.
The disease, extremely infectious, does not present a danger to humans, especially affecting cattle, pigs, sheep and goats. Until Thursday, the animal health authorities had carried out controls at almost 1,000 farms in Hungary, only four in the affected region in the northwest having positive results.
“At this stage, we can say that it is not possible to exclude the fact that the virus was not of natural origin, we may deal with an artificial virus,” said the chief of office of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Gergely Gulyas, in a press conference.
Answer a question, Gulyas said he cannot exclude the fact that virus epidemic is the result of a “biological attack”, without indicating who could be responsible. He said that the suspicion is based on verbal information received from a foreign laboratory, but their results have not yet been fully proven and documented.
The Hungarian cattle stock has numbered 861,000 heads based on a census of the seapl in December, slightly changed to the levels of the previous year. It represented 1.2% of the total cattle stocks in the European Union, according to official statistics.
In an attempt to limit the outbreak, thousands of cattle had to be slaughtered, while Austria and Slovakia closed dozens of border crossing, after the disease appeared in the southern part of Slovakia.
