The Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency says it has developed, for the first time in the world, a differential diagnosis technology for lumpy skin disease(LSD), a viral disease that affects cattle.

With the technology, jointly developed with Median Diagnostics, it can be determined within eight hours if a cow is infected with LSD. 

When the nation saw cases of LSD emerge last October, such technology was applied and more than 22-hundred cows at 27 farms that weren’t infected with the disease were not culled. 

The agency said existing gene differentiation methods used to pick out infected cows take at least a week for results to come out, making it difficult to apply them at urgent quarantine sites. 

The agency said it plans to commercialize the new technology starting next year.