Will the Orbán cabinet close Hungary’s busiest Budapest-Vienna motorway due to disease?
The opposition Tisza Party expects the government to “enact immediate and real measures” to contain an outbreak of food-and-mouth disease in Hungary, Peter Magyar, the party’s leader, said in a statement on Wednesday, calling on the government to resolve the problems related to combating infections.
The deadly disease continues to spread
Magyar said the steps taken so far to contain the outbreak “raise several questions”, given the measures taken by Austria after outbreaks reported near its border.
He said the party wanted to know why the armed forces had not been deployed to secure farms affected by the outbreak as high-risk epidemiological locations. He also asked the government why disinfection gates had not been installed at border crossings and around observation zones and why there was no comprehensive information campaign on the infectiousness of the disease and the economic risks associated with it. Magyar said his party also wanted to know why there have not been measures implemented to address the market disruptions affecting farmers in the observation zones.
He said the most important task was to make the decisions necessary to contain the spread of the disease, adding that professional organisations and livestock farms in Gyor-Moson-Sopron County in the north-west had put forward multiple proposals on which “no progress has been made on the part of the agriculture ministry”.
M1 motorway will be closed?
Tisza said it agreed with farmers and supported their proposals to introduce immediate vehicle disinfections at the M1 motorway’s entrances, exits and junctions, each with two-person army patrols. They also called for the installment of disinfection gates, particularly for animal health inspections on traffic from Slovakia.
The party urged a total ban on freight traffic on the M1 motorway with the exception of lorries whose destination or point of departure are Gyor-Moson-Sopron or Komárom-Esztergom counties.
Hungary armed forces conducting disinfection work at locations affected by foot-and-mouth outbreak
The Hungarian Armed Forces are conducting disinfection work at locations affected by the outbreak of food-and-mouth disease after the disease was detected at more farms in the country in recent days, the defence minister said on Wednesday. The Hungarian Armed Forces can be counted on, Kristof Szalay-Bobrovniczky said on Facebook, adding that like during last year’s floods, the Hungarian troops were prepared to help wherever they were needed.
Read also:
It’s entirely unclear how diverting a goods vehicle travelling from, say Bulgaria to Germany via the M1 motorway is going to help prevent the spread of the virus affecting nearby farms.