China has tightened border controls and initiated mass cattle culling operations on Friday following the detection of a highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) strain in its northwestern provinces.

The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture confirmed the SAT-1 serotype in 219 cattle across two herds totaling 6,229 animals in Gansu province and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, prompting rapid state intervention to protect immunologically "naive" domestic livestock.

Foot-and-mouth disease is a severe viral infection that strictly afflicts cloven-hoofed animals, including cattle, swine, sheep, goats and water buffalo. Symptoms include blisters on the nose, tongue, lips, inside the mouth, between the toes, above the hooves, and on the teats of infected livestock.

According to the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), ruptured blisters can result in extreme lameness and reluctance of the animal to move or eat. Usually, blisters heal within 7 days or longer, but complications, such as bacterial infections due to open blisters, can also occur.

Other frequent symptoms are fever, depression, increased salivation, loss of appetite, weight loss, growth retardation and a drop in milk production, which can persist even after recovery.

While it can devastate agricultural economies through reduced milk and meat yields, the virus is not considered a risk to human health according to WOAH.

The SAT-1 (South African Territories 1) strain driving this outbreak is known for its aggressiveness and has recently spread from Africa into the Middle East and Asia. Industry analysts noted it was the first time the SAT-1 serotype had been detected in China, rendering existing domestic vaccines for the more common O and A serotypes ineffective according to Reuters.

The detection in Xinjiang, which borders Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, comes amid growing alarm over suspected cross-border spread. In Russia, authorities have culled roughly 90,000 cattle in Siberia since February. While Russian authorities officially attribute the losses to pasteurellosis and rabies, international agricultural experts and the U.S. Department of Agriculture suspect the massive scale of the culling points to an unacknowledged foot-and-mouth epidemic.

This escalating threat has triggered the neighboring country of Kazakhstan to preemptively ban the importation of Russian live animals, meat, dairy products and fodder from affected regions to protect its herds.