A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report said that 327,000 out of nearly 2.5 million head of livestock hit by foot-and-mouth disease had died in Iraq due to a lack of vaccines.

The report obtained by Reuters on April 14 said 2,398,967 head of livestock were infected by foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) - an acute, highly contagious, viral infection of domestic and wild cloven-hoofed animals.

It said some 327,066 head of livestock had died between November 1998 and February this year because of the disease.

The report said all Iraq's livestock, around eight million according to Iraq's 1986 census, needed to be vaccinated against the disease.

"Ideally all sheep, cattle and goats would require two vaccinations per year at a cost of $15 million," it said.

It said a UN assessment mission consisting of two experts were in Iraq between February 26 and March 8, 1999 and made field visits to seven of the affected governorates and collected tissue samples.

The UN Security Council's sanctions committee, after numerous pleas from Iraq and the FAO report, allowed Baghdad to buy one million vaccines to combat the disease under its oil-for-food deal with the UN. The doses would be purchased from India and were expected to take three months to reach Iraq.

"The multitude of diseases afflicting livestock in Iraq threatens the health of people living in infested areas," the FAO added.

The report noted cases of the disease in central and southern Iraq and also in northern Iraq which has been outside the control of the Iraqi government since the end of the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait. The area is looked after by UN humanitarian agencies.

The FAO report said that the first suspected cases of FMD were reported in Rutba, near the border with Jordan. It said the highest number of cases was registered in the governorate of Anbar, 150 kilometers northwest of Baghdad where some 1,307,898 cases were reported.

Nineveh (Mosul) governorate, 450 kilometers north of Baghdad, had the second highest number of cases, it said.

Last month a UN official said the disease was spreading to such neighboring countries as Jordan and Syria.

The FAO report said so far only two lots of 250,000 cattle doses of vaccine had been procured under phases one and four of the oil-for-food pact. Contracts to buy the vaccines under phases two and three were blocked by the UN sanctions committee on Iraq, it added.

The oil-for-food deal allows Iraq to sell $5.26 billion worth of oil every six months to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian needs to offset suffering of Iraqis under sanctions imposed for Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The deal is now in its fifth phase which began in November and ends in May.

Iraq last week demanded that the United Nations compensate it for a shortage of cattle and dairy products which it said was caused by foot-and-mouth disease.

Prices of meat have been soaring up in Iraq since the imposition of the sanctions. A kilo of lamb meat, for example, had risen to 3,000 Iraqi dinars from less than one dinar.

Iraq's Agriculture Minister Abdulillah Hameed Mahmoud Saleh said his country used to produce millions of FMD vaccines at a plant which was destroyed by the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) hunting for Iraqi weapons programs. UNSCOM believes that the plant can be used for producing biological weapons.

UNSCOM's chairman, Richard Butler, said in March that the plant was destroyed by UN inspectors because it was used to produce biological weapons and not vaccine to fight foot-and-mouth disease, as claimed by Iraq.

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