Severe infections of the midge-borne virus can cause a blue tongue, abortions, stillbirths, and death in livestock.
British livestock farmers are confronting an unprecedented spread of bluetongue, a virus carried by biting midges. Cases this season have exceeded the previous three seasons combined, according to UK government data updated on Saturday.
The UK has recorded 2,579 cases so far in the 2026-27 bluetongue season, which runs from July 1 to June 30 of next year, according to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). The government defines a case as a property where bluetongue has been confirmed.
In just three months, this season’s bluetongue outbreak has recorded more than four times as many cases as the previous three seasons combined.
The government recorded 348 cases in Great Britain in the 2025-26 season, 163 in 2024-25, and 126 in 2023-24.
The virus affects sheep, cattle, and other ruminants. Common signs include fever, lameness, mouth sores, and swelling of the head or tongue. Severe infections can cause a blue tongue, breathing problems, abortions, fetal deformities, stillbirths, and death. The virus does not infect people or pose a risk to food safety.
Bluetongue was first identified in Africa but has spread across southern, central, and northern Europe. Rising temperatures have helped expand the range and transmission season of the biting midges that carry the virus, according to the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH).
“Essentially the midges are active earlier and continue their activity until later in the year,” Dr. Christopher Sanders of the Pirbright Institute said in a WOAH publication on an earlier outbreak. “That means that the gap between transmission seasons is actually reduced, which may allow the virus to overwinter more easily.”
The bluetongue outbreak comes as livestock producers across the Atlantic are confronting another insect-borne threat.
The New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasitic fly eradicated from the US decades ago, re-emerged in the country in June. The federal and state authorities have since stepped up surveillance and imposed measures aimed at containing its spread. Canada has restricted imports of livestock and other susceptible animals from Texas and New Mexico, where screwworm cases have been detected.
Image credit: Jakob Cotton
AI scaremongering didn’t work.
Release the midget virus.
Vaccines for animals and humans incoming.
Roll your sleeves goyim.
Christopher Booker – “A conspiracy to kill off the countryside” Daily Mail Aug 7, 2001
Whale.to
TO THOSE of us who have been trying to follow the details of the foot-and-mouth crisis since it began in February, there have always been two great mysteries.
The first Is why the Government’s response has been so astonishingly incompetent. Everything it has done has seemed designed, not to bring the disease rapidly to an end, but to kill as many animals as possible and so inflict maximum damage on Britain’s small livestock farmers.
The second mystery has been why the Government’s propaganda machine has been so consistent in its efforts to blacken the farmers and, wherever possible blame them as the real cause of the problem.
Already the total number of animals destroyed is over six million — one in ten of all the farm animals In Britain.
Foot-and-mouth disease is the disease, while the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) is the virus that causes it?
We’re right jim, us globalist elites have got our bunkers and new-world plans all sorted for ourselves … So now we’ll put the order out… Nuke the chickens, nuke the cows, nuke the farms, nuke the water, nuke the forests, nuke the gas fields and nuke the humans
The UK is already in the grip of a serious fuel pressure situation, and it compounds badly with a worsening bluetongue outbreak.
Fuel scarcity would hit the bluetongue response at nearly every operational node, and the effects compound in ways that are worse than either crisis alone.
All sorts of implications that may exasperate the current situation if the alleged outbreak were to intensify.