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Brucellosis Has Broken Out in Gurjaani

January 23, 2007

daavad.gifIn Gurjaani, domestic animals were found to have the symptoms of brucellosis. According to veterinarians, the disease has already widely spread, however the district vet laboratory has not received any information regarding the situation. One person has already become ill with the disease and in the district hospital premature births have increased.

“Brucellosis is a chronic infection among animals. Mostly cows are infected with it; then it infects goats, sheep and pigs. The infection can be spread from animals to people while eating meat, drinking milk and some other dairy products. Initially, we doubted that the disease was in the village of Melaani in the Gurjaani district. Natural miscarriage among cows was widely observed and we applied to the district vet laboratory. They took blood tests and many cows tested positive for the disease. So many cows were infected with the disease in Melaani that we could say the brucellosis had broken out. I think the same is the situation in many other villages in the district and it might be even worse,” said veterinarian Gulo Iremashvili.

“The cattle, infected with the brucellosis, must be killed in sanitary conditions and the meat must be destroyed. However, the meat can be eaten after being disinfected.  To destroy the brucellosis infection, the meat must be chopped into pieces of 2, 5 kilo and they must be boiled for three hours each. However, we doubt that people who do not know about the disease would be as careful with the meat they buy in the district.   Thus, the brucellosis can be easily spread among people,” said Iremashvili.

Merab Ososhvili, the head of the local vet laboratory, does not consider the current situation too urgent. “Cows usually get infected with brucellosis but now we do not have urgent data. Thus we have not informed the population about the infection,” he said.

The people from the village of Melaani in the Gurjaani district are anxious and demand urgent measures to be taken by special services. “We are too poor and cannot kill our cows and throw the meat away. But we will not doom ourselves to infection because of meat. Furthermore, a person has already been found with the disease in the neighboring village of Arashenda.

“Veterinarians arrived from the Gurjaani vet laboratory and tested our cows’ blood. After an analysis, they comforted us, saying it was not dangerous. Although cows in our village have symptoms of brucellosis, we have neither killed the cows nor wasted the milk. We still sell dairy products and if someone kills a cow we will buy meat in the market and street,” said villagers.

Veterinarians from the Gurjaani agricultural market do not deny the possibility of selling the ill meat in their market and mostly in the street. “It is impossible to find out the illness with the meat after a test in the market. The infection can be found after a serological test which we cannot do in the market.”

Nana Utiashvili, an epidemiologist for the Gurjaani district hospital, said that nobody has applied to their hospital with the symptoms of brucellosis. “The symptoms of the infection among people are inflamed joints, high temperature and premature birth. Nobody has applied to the hospital with those symptoms yet. However, a person might be infected but cannot guess the cause, thinking s/he has a virus,” said the doctor.

Officials from the Social Healthcare Gurjani District Service Department neither deny nor confirm the danger of spreading infection.

“Cattle get infected with brucellosis every year but sufficient research is not carried out. As far as I have been informed, only one person is infected in the village of Arashenda. We do not have detailed information about the person because nobody has informed our service department about the people who are infected or whether there is a danger of spreading the disease,” said epidemiologist Tina Tsverikmazashvili.

Iremashvili considers that brucellosis might spread even more. “The danger is increasing day by day. Besides that, the question is where infected cows must be killed while there is not a sanitary place for it in the district. I think, institution of the village veterinarians must not have been abolished,” said the veterinarian of the vet testing laboratory.

According to the Gurjaani district hospital, for the last few days some cases of premature births have occurred though lately the number of births has decreased.

Gela Mtivlishvili, Kakheti  

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