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Cattle Disease Wreaks Havoc in Libya

Some farmers have reported losing 70 percent of their cattle to the disease in Libya's Misrata - AFP 
Some farmers have reported losing 70 percent of their cattle to the disease in Libya's Misrata - AFP 
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Cattle Disease Wreaks Havoc in Libya

Some farmers have reported losing 70 percent of their cattle to the disease in Libya's Misrata - AFP 
Some farmers have reported losing 70 percent of their cattle to the disease in Libya's Misrata - AFP 

On Najmeddine Tantoun's farm on the outskirts of the western Libyan city of Misrata, the usual whir of hundreds of dairy milking machines has given way to near silence.

The farmer has lost almost half his cows to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a highly contagious illness affecting hoofed animals.

The outbreak in Libya has dealt a major blow to many cattle farmers, who say they have yet to receive vaccines for their animals as dairy and meat production suffers.

Most of the North African country's revenue comes from its oil resources, but Misrata is a major dairy center which used to produce 70,000 liters of milk a day.

Some farmers have reported losing 70 percent of their cattle to the disease in Libya's Misrata, AFP reported.
Output has now fallen to 20,000 per day, according to Salem al-Badri, 45, head of the city's committee of cattle farmers.

Tantoun, 27, said "the future looks bleak".

"I almost lost everything," he said. "From 742 cows, we lost about 300. This disease is destroying our livelihoods."

The disease particularly affects ruminant livestock, such as cattle, sheep and goats. It causes fever, blisters -- and sometimes death.

In Misrata, some farmers have reported losing about 70 percent of their cattle to the disease, according to Badri's committee.

"We are heading towards a catastrophe," Badri, who is also in charge of the city's animal health office, said during a visit to Tantoun's farm.

Milk production has fallen from 70,000 to 20,000 litres because of the outbreak, a local committee head says

"The delay in vaccines has cost us dearly," he added. "Most of the cows in Misrata are now infected and we have no choice but to slaughter them to stop the epidemic."

The disease has also inflicted financial hardship on consumers as shortages drive up the price of meat and dairy.

Badri said another cattle ailment called lumpy skin disease has also had an impact, with foreign buyers growing wary of importing Libyan cowhide.

Authorities in the east and west have rolled out emergency vaccination plans with support from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, but some farmers said the response had often come too late.

Badri said a group of cattle farmers have filed a lawsuit with the attorney general.

One of the main causes of the spread of these diseases is the illegal importation of animals without veterinary control, the agriculture ministry has said.

Additionally, contamination spreads uncontrollably as cases are not reported to local authorities in time, it said, adding that some cattle might have died without being reported either.

"We depend entirely on these animals for our livelihood," said Tantoun, adding that he had "given everything" for his farm to succeed.

"Losing so many cows is an economic disaster."

He called on authorities in Misrata "not only to provide the necessary vaccines" but also "to compensate" cattle farmers whose cows have suffered from the disease.

Farmer Ali Ghabag said he has completely given up on cattle farming "out of fear for the future".

"Nobody wants to continue in this sector anymore," the 40-year-old said.

"The risks have become too big, and we don't know if we will overcome this crisis."

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Varieties

Quite Dramatic End to a Planet Swallowed by its Host Star

An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS
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Quite Dramatic End to a Planet Swallowed by its Host Star

An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS

In May 2020, astronomers for the first time observed a planet getting swallowed by its host star. Based on the data at the time, they believed the planet met its doom as the star puffed up late in its lifespan, becoming what is called a red giant.

New observations by the James Webb Space Telescope - sort of a postmortem examination - indicate that the planet's demise happened differently than initially thought, according to Reuters.

Instead of the star coming to the planet, it appears the planet came to the star, with disastrous consequences – a death plunge after an erosion of this alien world's orbit over time, researchers said.

The end was quite dramatic, as evidenced by the aftermath documented by Webb.

Reuters wrote that the orbiting telescope, which was launched in 2021 and became operational in 2022, observed hot gas likely forming a ring around the star following the event and an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene.

“We do know that there is a good amount of material from the star that gets expelled as the planet goes through its death plunge. The after-the-fact evidence is this dusty leftover material that was ejected from the host star,” said astronomer Ryan Lau of the US National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The star is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aquila.

A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). The star is slightly redder and less luminous than our sun and about 70% of its mass.

The planet is believed to have been from a class called “hot Jupiter’s” - gas giants at high temperatures owing to a tight orbit around their host star.

“We believe it probably had to be a giant planet, at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, to cause as dramatic of a disturbance to the star as what we are seeing,” said study co-author Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Jupiter is our solar system's largest planet.

The researchers believe that the planet's orbit had gradually deteriorated due to its gravitational interaction with the star, and hypothesized about what happened next.

“Then it starts grazing through the atmosphere of the star. At that point, the headwind of smashing through the stellar atmosphere takes over and the planet falls increasingly rapidly into the star,” MacLeod said.

“The planet both falls inward and gets stripped of its gaseous outer layers as it plows deeper into the star. Along the way, that smashing heats up and expels stellar gas, which gives rise to the light we see and the gas, dust and molecules that now surround the star,” MacLeod said.

But they cannot be certain of the actual fatal events.

“In this case, we saw how the plunge of the planet affected the star, but we don't truly know for certain what happened to the planet. In astronomy there are lots of things way too big and way too 'out there' to do experiments on. We can't go to the lab and smash a star and planet together - that would be diabolical. But we can try to reconstruct what happened in computer models,” MacLeod said.

None of our solar system's planets are close enough to the sun for their orbits to decay, as happened here. That does not mean that the sun will not eventually swallow any of them.

About five billion years from now, the sun is expected to expand outward in its red giant phase and could well engulf the innermost planets Mercury and Venus, and maybe even Earth. During this phase, a star blows off its outer layers, leaving just a core behind - a stellar remnant called a white dwarf.

Webb's new observations are giving clues about the planetary endgame.

“Our observations hint that maybe planets are more likely to meet their final fates by slowly spiraling in towards their host star instead of the star turning into a red giant to swallow them up. Our solar system seems to be relatively stable though, so we only have to worry about the sun becoming a red giant and swallowing us up,” Lau said.