Before the foot-and-mouth disease disaster began in last November, there still existed some cases reporting the infection. In May 2010, a farm raising pigs in Chung-Yang was reported to have foot-and-mouth disease infection on the pigs.

 It was six months later when ?the? foot-and-mouth disease broke out in Andong. In November 2010, a farm in Andong raising cows and pigs were officially reported to have livestock infected to the disease. It is known that the virus was carried by a traveler who visited animal farm in Vietnam. However, unfortunately, livestock diagnosed as foot-and-mouth disease were pigs, which are more likely to spread the virus of the disease.

 With such bad condition and weak governmental policy toward the disease, foot-and-mouth disease spread more than quickly, threatening not only the farm owners, but also unrelated general citizens.

 We can list some notable dates in chronological order. In December 2010, cases of foot-and-mouth disease were discovered in Gangwondo, Paju, and Incheon. At this point, the government decided to vaccinate all susceptible animals to prevent further spread. However, this policy didn?t seem to be that effective in that new cases were discovered on New Year?s Day of 2011 in ChungNam, following ChungBuk two days later. In the middle of January, Daegu area no longer became foot-and-mouth disease safe area, and GyeongNam founded cases in late January. Basically, at this point, most areas in South Korea became dangerous zone of foot-and-mouth disease.

 It is no doubt that the government ignored the seriousness of the matter, and reacted late. However, there are assumptions that convenient road systems of today actually worsened the matter. To be more specific, it is thought that the trucks or heavy cars ?transported? the virus to many different areas. This is said because of cars? size. People analyze that because of their large size, it was almost impossible to thoroughly sanitize all part of the car. Thus, parts with less sanitation or none actually moved the virus from one place to another, causing dramatic speed of spread.

  However, regardless of the reason, it is important to learn from the past and not repeat the same mistake over again. I believe that the government, farm owners, and even us, normal citizens learned a lot from this drastic event. Therefore, we should not repeat the same thing that happened months ago, and took months to recover.