| From the archives of The Memory Hole |
Article from the London Times cited by Steve Ransom in his article, Foot and Mouth - the Management of a Pseudo-crisis.
Foot-and-mouth is as serious to animals as a bad cold is to human beings. So why the concern? Foot-and-mouth has gained a grip on this nation and fear of the disease seems as powerful as the disease itself. We recognise foot-and-mouth not by its symptoms, but by what we do to control it: the restrictions on movement, the slaughter of animals, the burning of carcasses.
From the panic and the headlines you would imagine that this is a most dreadful disease. Yet foot-and-mouth very rarely kills the animals that catch it. They almost always recover, and in a couple of weeks at that. It almost never gets passed on to humans and when it does it is a mild infection only. The meat from animals that have had it is fit to eat. In clinical terms, foot-and-mouth is about as serious, to animals or to people, as a bad cold.
Why, then, the concern? And why the policy of wholesale slaughter? The concern, of course, is economic. This is a financial issue, not an animal welfare issue, nor a human health one. No one abroad will take our meat if it might be infected with foot-and-mouth. And that worldwide exclusion zone stems from British policies of the past. It was we who, in the late 19th century, decided that foot-and-mouth should not be lived with, but should be eliminated, shut out through the cordon sanitaire; it was we, in the 1950s, who encouraged first the Continent, then the rest of the world, into following suit. Now it is we who must live with the results of that policy.
Foot-and-mouth disease does reduce the productivity of an animal: its milk yield, its rate of putting on of flesh. There are no figures for how much it reduces these things; part of the reason for that is that no one since the 1920s in Britain has seen the disease take its full course. Any animal infected with it has been immediately slaughtered That reduction in productivity, that fear of small economic loss, is what lies behind the elimination policy and the huge economic costs that are now being incurred.
It need not have been like that. The animal control policy was the result of economics rather than biology. Under conditions of world trade now it is a decision almost impossible to reverse.
Foot-and-mouth first appeared in Britain in 1839 from the import of live infected animals and later from ships, from dockyards, from Argentinian meat and skins, even from foreign hay. For much of the 19th century it was endemic in the UK and it did not destroy farming. Farmers lived with it, as they live with bad weather, poor harvests and other afflictions of their livelihood.
It was owners of pedigree herds, rather than common-or-garden milk or meat producers, who from 1869 prompted efforts to eradicate it. It was achieved by isolation, by movement restrictions, by temporary closures of markets and by prohibition of live imports but not by slaughtering. By 1900, Britain was disease-free, but was subject to waves of re-introductions of foot-and-mouth from the Continent and from South American meat. Outbreaks, and now slaughters as well as isolations, were frequent; but familiarity made them more of an irritant than the terror we have today.
A policy of living with foot-and-mouth almost became an option again in the 1920s. A bad outbreak in Cheshire was on the verge of running out of control.Ministry teams were so far behind in their slaughtering that on many farms the cows had recovered from the disease before the slaughterers arrived. And farmers looked at their now-normal cows in bewilderment and asked: �Was that it? Was that rather trivial illness what all the fuss was about?� Not surprisingly, they began to question the need for slaughter.
Even the Ministry of Agriculture, now wedded to the policy of slaughter, was pressured into taking heed of farmers' views, and even asked them which policy they would prefer, elimination or toleration. It even went to a vote. But by that time burnings had got on top of the disease, and the vote, though close, was to continue measures of eradication.
This was the last time that people saw the full course of the illness. Memories of what a slight disease it was began to fade. The biggest outbreak in our history, in 1967-68, is the one that lingers in present memories, and memory of those days fuels the grim processes we now see.
A policy of living with foot-and-mouth might have worked in the 1920s, and had we adopted it we would not be witness to the present scenes. But in those days productivity was not the be-all and end-all that it is now. So many diseases were around that a farmer was happy if his animals survived to give milk and meat at all. The rate at which they gave milk and meat was much less important.
Today, agri-business is a term that everyone knows, and productivity is everything. A slower growth-rate, a lesser yield, is intolerable. And with markets being global or nothing at all, a Britain with foot-and-mouth would find its meat unexportable and its farmers bankrupted.
It is now too late to consider the option of tolerating the disease. So the cows are slaughtered. Our past policy has forced us to this pass. That policy evolved in a very different farming world from today; historical precedent has informed our current position, but, ironically, today's realities make that position far more justified than ever it was when it began.
The author is a vet and researcher into the history of foot-and-mouth for the Wellcome Trust at the University of Manchester.
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