The United Kingdom's Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AVHLA) said today that the virus has been found on 29 farms in England; in the past few weeks they found it in sheep, but today announced that they have identified it in cattle as well. In mainland Europe, it has been identified on several hundred farms in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, and most recently in France. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has said that the new virus's closest relatives do not cause disease in humans     but that other more distantly related viruses do.

The viral vector     the thing which spreads it     is believed to be midges, small flying biting insects (Culicoides) and maybe also mosquitoes (Culicidae). The disease doesn't pass from adult animal to another animal, but apparently does from a mother animal to its offspring in utero, and that is why it is showing up now: It's lambing season. With Europe enduring its coldest winter in decades, there are no virus-carrying insects flying around now. Instead, the animals that are giving birth to deformed and dead offspring were infected last summer and fall. No one has been able to say so far whether the organism can survive in insects over the winter (the way West Nile virus, for instance, may).

Meanwhile, the British Veterinary Record seizes on the outbreaks to make a larger point: Finding new diseases such as Schmallenberg depends on having good disease surveillance       but in the UK, funding is about to be sharply cut.

It is precisely this kind of emerging disease threat that scanning surveillance aims to detect     and it is also this kind of disease threat that might not be detected promptly if, for whatever reason, arrangements for surveillance fall short of the mark

Schmallenberg virus is not the first new disease to be detected by scanning surveillance, nor will it be the last. It was scanning surveillance that identified the emergence of BSE in the late 1980s and, in more recent years, it has been responsible for, among other things, the early detection of pandemic H1N1 influenza in pigs, four notifiable avian disease outbreaks, bovine TB in non-bovine species, antimicrobial resistance in Salmonella and virulent psoroptic mange in cattle. The AHVLA has noted that the value of its surveillance programme has greatly exceeded the cost in recent years, with monetised benefits having been estimated at over £200 million a year.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization has said global food output must rise 70 per cent by 2050 to feed a world population expected to grow to 9 billion from 7 billion now and as increasingly wealthy consumers in developing economies eat more meat. Food prices tracked by the FAO climbed to the highest ever a year ago on surging grain prices.

Cargill, based in Minnesota, trades all kinds of farm commodities, including cocoa, soybeans, corn, sugar, meat, wheat and ethanol. Conway is based in Cobham, England. Wheat has doubled since the end of 2005, raw sugar is twice the price in December 2008 and orange juice climbed to a record last month.

Group of 20 farm ministers agreed to a plan last year in June to set limits on export bans and create a crop database to tackle what French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the "plague" of rising food prices.

As many as 925 million people already faced hunger worldwide in 2010, based on the FAO's estimates. In response to the 2008 food price crisis, countries from India and Egypt to Vietnam and Indonesia banned exports of rice, a staple for half the world. Russia in 2010 banned cereal exports after the country's worst drought in at least half a century destroyed crops and cut production, sparking a surge in grain prices across the world. Ukraine also restricted exports.

"The world's farmers, some of the smartest businessmen that there are, can produce enough food to feed the next two billion people," Conway said. "We are very confident about that. However, they need help."

The Syrian military did not come close to the border with Israel. However, armored forces that were stationed along the Syria-Jordan border, which were recently reinforced, were moved and are now closer to Israel, according to the report.

The Free Syria Army is the largest opposition group in Syria and is partly made up of defectors from the official Syrian Army. Israel has been concerned that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, whose regime is on the verge of collapse, may try to defuse the uprising against him by starting a conflict with Israel.

A Lebanese newspaper, The People's Army, claimed Thursday in its news website that the IDF has been making an extra effort in the past few days to place landmines all along its border with Syria.