Foot-and-mouth disease is testing the commitments to transparency by Beijing officials, who have categorically denied reports of an outbreak on the city's outskirts.
Amid reports that thousands of dairy cows were slaughtered to check the spread of the disease, officials maintained that no sick cows had been found. They claimed roadblocks to villages containing dairy farms had been erected for 'routine disease control'.
'We have no reported case of foot-and-mouth disease,' said an official at the husbandry office of Yanqing county.
The same denial was repeated by an official from the Ministry of Agriculture. 'We have no new cases to report after those in Jiangsu and Shandong ,' he said.
Officials from Shanghai and Anhui province , neighbouring Jiangsu, and Henan province , west of Shandong, all denied having any cases.
On May 13, the ministry reported that two small outbreaks in April resulted in the killing of 183 head of cattle in Jiangsu and 40 in Shandong.
Industry sources said that although foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks occurred on the mainland every year, the central government had never reported the disease previously and the country was classified as free of the disease.
