UC Davis is carefully screening visitors and reviewing safety procedures to ensure the campus is kept free of foot-and-mouth disease, which is devastating sheep, cattle and hog populations in Great Britain and parts of Western Europe. The highly contagious viral disease, for which there is no treatment, is not likely to spread to campus through animal contact. The United States Department of Agri-culture imposes strict quarantine regulations for animals coming into the country, said Bradford Smith, director of the Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital. It is also unlikely that the disease could be carried to campus through human contact, he said. The recent outbreak in England has been traced to tainted restaurant waste fed to pigs. But even with the slightest chance of infection, the veterinary hospital and Department of Animal Science staff and faculty are still closely following California Department of Food and Agriculture guidelines designed to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth. Visitors or those returning from countries where foot-and-mouth is active or endemic -- most of Asia, Africa and South America -- are prohibited from visiting university livestock or the veterinary hospital unless they have been in the United States for at least five days. Additionally, visitors are asked to not wear shoes that have been near animals, and to launder their clothing. Despite the care taken, Smith urged the campus not to be paranoid about foot-and-mouth disease. "We've had people coming and going all over the world since 1929 (the last time foot-and-mouth hit the country). How many outbreaks? Zero," he said. "Now that we've had this outbreak, we are taking extra precautions." When the foot-and-mouth outbreak hit in late February, two veterinary students were in England. "The nice thing about veterinarians is that they were aware what was going on," Smith said. "They both e-mailed to ask what they should do about their return. They understood the shoe rule and were happy to oblige." In other cases, campus facilities are taking a more vigilant approach to their usual protocol for preventing infectious animal diseases. At the new UC Davis Swine Teaching and Research Center on Straloch Road, facility manager Kent Parker has staff and students don plastic boots and dip their feet in an ammonia disinfectant before entering the hog barn. Visitors are given paper booties to put on their feet. "It's always been the policy, but hopefully it's being adhered to more now," he said. With the move of the hog barn off the central campus, fewer visitors are wandering on their own around the barnyards. And any prospective group tour will get a lot of questions, Parker said. Many of the public's visits to university livestock facilities are arranged through the International Agricultural Visitors Program. The office also occasionally arranges visits to commercial livestock facilities, said director Linda Childress. Businesses she's talked to recently don't want to risk having any foreign visitors during the outbreak, she said. She's also taking a careful approach to visits to campus facilities. The office hasn't decided whether a group of public officials and agricultural producers from Nicaragua and Honduras touring campus later this month will be able to visit dairy and beef cattle barns, or be limited to seeing research labs. Childress has already asked a professor from Germany's University of Bonn to reschedule a visit this fall. That group also had counted on being able to tour campus cattle facilities. "I'd rather be overly cautious than follow the basic guidelines," Childress said.