Foot-and-mouth disease can infect humans but when it does the illness is usually in a mild form, it was confirmed yesterday.
The condition is very rare in humans, but people can be infected through skin wounds by handling diseased stock. They cannot contract the infection by eating meat or drinking milk from infected animals.
The National Disease Surveillance Centre said foot-and-mouth disease was not a notifiable disease among humans in the Republic, and therefore the centre had no record of any case occurring in an Irish patient.
However, the centre's counterpart in Britain, the Public Health Laboratory Service, said a case was reported in the UK in 1967.
Ms Emily Collins, the laboratory's press officer, said the condition was identified in a male patient who presented with a slight sore throat, high temperature and blisters on the palms of his hands.
Mr Pat O'Mahony, chief specialist in veterinary public health at the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, emphasised that people could not be infected through the food chain.
"Very few cases have been reported even among people working with infected carcasses or in laboratories," he said.
He added that the condition in humans was self-limiting.
A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture said humans were "only rarely" infected by handling a diseased animal, and that infection was only "temporary and mild".