Ovine footrot: new approaches to an old disease

Abstract

Footrot is a bacterial disease that has substantial economic and welfare impacts in sheep and can be difficult to manage. Research is focussed on reducing the impact that footrot has on farmers and their flocks and better understanding the aetiology of the disease. Key areas of current research include, developing better vaccines, deploying tailored vaccines in a specific and targeted fashion on individual farms, analysing and developing better farm management practices to suit specific sheep farming environments, elucidating the virulence genes and bacterial population dynamics that drive footrot and using genetic testing in combination with selective breeding to produce stock that are more resilient to disease.