REVIEW 2025: How disease fears shaped agenda

If 2025 was dominated by any single issue, one strong contender may be a simple question – Are we ready?

Ready for whatever the Competition and Markets Authority might impose on one hand but, perhaps even more so, ready for the next major disease emergency.

The threat of disease has never gone away, as the enduring crises of avian flu and bluetongue reminded us by their enduring presence in the headlines.

But amid warnings of “significant gaps” in preparedness and the need to prevent “the next pandemic”, the question of our collective preparedness has been a constant feature of the news agenda.

The tone in that respect was set early with the re-emergence of foot and mouth disease in Europe being followed by questions over whether UK authorities had reacted to the outbreaks quickly enough.

Blunt warnings

Such questions would be given even greater emphasis by a Commons committee’s characterisation of it and other diseases as national security issues and its damning assessment that a major outbreak had only been avoided “by luck rather than design”.

Before that assessment became public, the UK’s chief vet was already admitting both that a fresh FMD outbreak would stretch UK disease capabilities and that changes to plans for such an occurrence had been updated in response to similarly stinging criticism from the National Audit Office.

But with questions over funding for upgrades of the APHA’s Weybridge headquarters remaining a regular feature for much of the year, the debate seems likely to continue through 2026.

Despite the, often blunt, warnings of the need for action, the news was not always bad. As its new global headquarters was unveiled in the heat of early July, Ceva Animal Health officials offered a vote of confidence in policymakers’ grip on the issue.

Tighter controls

Domestically, the passage of the puppy smuggling bill tabled by vet and MP Danny Chambers into law offered the prospect of tighter controls even as specific measures to combat brucella canis were implemented.

Meanwhile, on the clinical front, the tale of how a free dental check saved a dog from a deadly disease offered some late summer brightness and became one of Vet Times’ most read stories of the entire year.

But as 2025 drew to a close, the arrival of bluetongue in Northern Ireland for the first time plus fears over an African swine fever outbreak in Spain brought renewed attention to the problem.

The suggestion that a notifiable disease outbreak may well be a question of when rather than if offered a similarly sobering footnote to an often challenging year.