One afternoon in early 2001, Kate and I were sitting
watching a news report about a disease outbreak on a farm in Essex.
'Foot and mouth disease,' Kate said. 'That rings a bell.
Which one is that?'
I shrugged. 'Um... is it... it's the one with... er. It's
notifiable, isn't it?'
Kate looked pointedly back at the telly. 'Obviously.'
I shrugged again. 'Well, I'm sure it'll be okay.'
Hitherto, my sole encounter with the disease that would
cause such destruction in Devon was while I was failing my public health
examination in the fourth year. On the next page from the fabled 'Write short notes on the process of cheese
making,' there had been an essay question on foot and mouth disease. In the
exam I had wracked my brain to try and remember my crib notes, and splurged it
all out onto the blank sheet in front of me: A viral disease - a picornavirus,
to be precise. Very stable in the environment and highly contagious - the virus
can potentially travel miles as an airborne particle - possibly even across the
English Channel[1].
Predominantly affects ungulates. Causes fever, followed by ulcers in the mouth
and around the feet. Rarely fatal in adults, but can cause heart problems in neonates.
Otherwise self-limiting[2]
in a few weeks. Not present in the UK at this time.
I surrounded these bare bones with a fair amount of
waffle, but that covered most of the things I knew about the disease... which
is another reason I failed the public health exam. I had written my notes as if
I was looking at an individual animal. I wrote (and knew) almost nothing about
the economic implications of the disease.
That was going to change in the Spring of 2001.
*
Events moved quickly from that first diagnosis. A few
days after the disease was confirmed in Essex, movement restrictions were
placed in a five-mile radius around the site - no one could move animals in or
out of the zone. By then, of course, it was already too late. A few days after
that, a case was confirmed in Northumberland. The EU imposed a ban on the UK
exporting any meat or meat products, and shortly after that, foot and mouth
arrived in Devon. Within a week, cases
had been confirmed in Scotland, Cornwall and Cumbria. It was becoming clear
that the country was in the grip of a full-blown epidemic.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (MAFF)
appeared to be moving swiftly to combat the disease. They quickly instigated movement
restrictions all over the country - not just for cattle, sheep and pigs, but
for horses and dogs and humans too. Very soon into the crisis, they adopted a
policy known as the 'contiguous cull' - every time a new case of foot and mouth
was discovered, every cow, pig and sheep within a three mile radius was to be
slaughtered.
Kate and I watched the news unravel with some confusion.
Foot and Mouth (and, from here on I'm going to use the accepted abbreviation
FMD) was, in my mind, stored in a category along with kennel cough - highly
contagious, but low severity. FMD wasn't a zoonosis - humans can't catch it.[3]
It wasn't a pleasant disease to suffer from - what disease is? - but it certainly wasn't in the same league
as the horrors of rabies, or anthrax, or any number of other diseases that I
could think of without even reaching for my large animal medicine notes. It was
incredibly contagious, of course - but there was a vaccine available, wasn't
there? I was sure there was. Quite an effective one, as I remembered. Why was
the government behaving as if the dead had risen from the earth to feast upon
the living?
Nevertheless, with outbreaks popping up all over the
place, and with us being repeatedly told what a dreadful disease the government
was dealing with, we assumed there were good reasons behind all the measures. I
had failed that exam, after all - I was hardly an authority on the subject.
Within weeks it became clear that two counties had been
particularly badly hit by the disease - Cumbria, and Devon. MAFF was rapidly
running out of staff to help with the crisis, and the call went out for
veterinary surgeons to assist in combating the disease. Locuming at the time,
there was no reason for me not to help out - no reason, except that I was not
an experienced cattle vet, and I was concerned that I wasn't really the sort of
person that the ministry was looking for. I really wasn't sure that I wanted to
be involved in this 'contiguous cull', however necessary it was. I was, after
all, a vegetarian[4],
and so to some extent had opted out of the system already - although I still
drunk milk, and ate cheese, and I knew I was fooling myself if I thought that
didn't make me complicit in a lot of the problems of modern farming.
Nevertheless, it didn't seem like something I could help with.
A few weeks into March, I changed my mind. I would dearly
love to recount here that it was out of a sense of patriotism, or 'Blitz
spirit'- wanting to do my part for the country. I would, more dearly, like to
announce that the reason I became a Temporary Veterinary Inspector (TVI) for the
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food was because, if more slaughter was
necessary, then I would do what I could to ensure the welfare of those to be
killed was as good as it could be. There's some truth to both of these, but
here's the main, rather depressing one: MAFF were so desperate that they
announced they were doubling the pay of TVIs from £125 per day to £250. A
fortune for me - a week's pay for working a couple of days.
I applied, was accepted, fast-tracked, and within a few
days found myself standing outside the MAFF building near Exeter, hoping that
someone in charge would explain to me, in very simple terms, exactly what the
hell I was supposed to do.
While I was sitting in a large conference room, amongst
many other vets - some large animal veterans, some dyed-in the wool small
animal-types, some new graduates, and many, many Spanish vets, taking advantage
of the sudden opportunity for work and pay far better than anything they might
find in their home country - experiencing a very short induction lecture,
arguments were raging across the county and the political landscape. The
countryside had been, by this point, effectively shut down. People weren't
supposed to travel into it unless absolutely necessary. Tourists stopped coming
to the UK. Opposition party leaders were asking why MAFF hadn't imposed
restrictions as soon as they had confirmed the disease in the Essex abattoir -
as reports on the 1967 Northumberland epidemic were very clear that speed was of
the essence in controlling the disease. Many members of the general public
started asking the same question that had crossed my mind - what was so
terrible about this disease that demanded the extreme response of the
contiguous cull?
As I sat, flipping through my induction pack, listening
to the explanation of the disease control policy, a line from one of my
favourite childhood films ran through my mind. In Aliens, when Ellen Ripley discovers that the colony on LV421 has
been overrun by the terrifying creatures that wiped out her entire crew in the
first film, her solution is simple but effective.
'I say we take off,
and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.'
It occurred to
me that someone high up in the ministry was a fan of the film too.
*
Despite my worries, the
job itself was simple - far simpler than my normal day job. Every day we
(myself and a technician) would be assigned a number of farms to check in
Devon. We would drive to the farm entrances in our MAFF-assigned vehicles, park
outside, then don disposable boiler suits, hats and masks, dunk our white
Government-issue wellies into virucidal solution, and inspect every single
animal on the farm for symptoms of FMD. If all was well, we would move on to
the next farm. If we found anything suspicious, however, we would call in the
back-up, who would slaughter the suspected animals and test them for the
disease. If it was confirmed, then the contiguous cull would come into force -
every cow, sheep and pig in a three-mile radius would be culled, and their
bodies burned to prevent spread of infection.
By the time I started at MAFF, there were a lot of bodies
burning in Devon.
If we ever found FMD, then we would be, from that point
on, classified as 'dirty', and my veterinary services would then be required to
assist with the culling, and the clean-up afterwards. By this stage, with up to
fifty new cases being found every day, there was a lot of culling that needed
to be done. The military had been called in to help, and 'clean' vets were
becoming harder to find; hence the pay increase to attract new TVIs. Within a
few hours of my training video, I was inspecting sheep on a farm near
Okehampton, worrying that the few slides I had seen wouldn't be enough
preparation for me to tell the difference between FMD and footrot. By now, the
epidemic was at its height, and MAFF had introduced a 'suspected slaughter
policy' - no more waiting for confirmation of the disease. If I saw lameness,
would I be confident enough to cry wolf - and thus potentially condemn every
livestock animal within a three mile radius to death?
I was in a better position than some, however. A lot of
the Spanish vets had never seen a case of orf - a relatively common disease of
sheep in Devon, that caused blistering lesions around the teats, mouth and
feet. If they suspected FMD, it didn't matter how many times the farmer pointed
out they were actually looking at orf. All the animals on the farm would then
be slaughtered, and if the case was deemed suspect enough, everything within
three kilometres.
Visiting a farm as a MAFF vet was a very different
experience from visiting one as a normal vet. Some farmers were friendly and
welcoming, but these were the exceptions. The majority were scared that we
would find something on their farm, or suspicious that despite our extravagant
precautions at their gate, we would bring the disease to them. Who could blame
them? Farmers were compensated for the loss of their animals, but money doesn't
go very far in alleviating the distress caused by watching everything on your
farm get slaughtered and burned. Those were uncomfortable visits, farmers
nervously showing you their animals, silently praying that you didn't suddenly
order them to stop, to take a closer look at something, and speak the words
that would mean destruction of everything they had built up.
A couple of weeks into my work as a TVI, the Ministry for
Agriculture, Food and Fisheries transformed into the Department of Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs, or DEFRA. It must have been in the pipeline before the
outbreak started - the wheels of government turn slowly - but at the time it
felt like a response to the perception of poor handling of the crisis in the
media. Don't worry - MAFF are no longer in charge of fighting the disease!
DEFRA is on the case now. What it meant, in practical terms, was that one day I
went to work to discover that all the headed paper had been changed from one
logo to another.
I worked for about two months as a TVI during the crisis,
travelling from farm to farm - usually three or four a day, but some of the big
units, especially large sheep farms, took up a whole day or more. I was lucky.
The farmers I visited were lucky. I saw plenty of lameness; I saw footrot, and
I saw orf, but I never saw anything that resembled foot and mouth disease. I made
it through clean.
*
The final case of the
outbreak was reported on a Cumbrian farm at the end of September. Movement
restrictions were finally lifted in 2002, a year after the first case. DEFRA's
contiguous cull policy had worked. FMD was once again eradicated from the
United Kingdom, after the slaughter of around ten million sheep, cattle and
pigs.
I kept turning it over in my mind. FMD was a relatively
mild, self-limiting disease in adult cattle. That was a hard thing to reconcile
with the huge pyres of blackened, burning bodies that I, thankfully, only ever
encountered on the news. The contiguous cull policy had worked. So would have
taking off, and nuking the site from orbit.
Here's the reason that FMD was taken so seriously by the
Government: the economy, stupid. Affected cows suffer 'milk drop' - a reduction
in the milk that they produce. This milk drop is usually temporary, but it can
be permanent.
There is, as I had suspected, all those years ago, a
vaccine available for FMD. It's very effective, and relatively cheap. However,
once you've vaccinated an animal, it is then impossible to test for the disease
itself - the animal will test positive if the vaccine was effective. For this
reason, the World Health Organization classifies countries according to their
FMD status thusly: 1 - FMD present; 2 - FMD-free with vaccination; 3 - FMD-free
without vaccination. The third and last group gets better access to export
markets, so countries in this group work hard to stay there; it's fair to say
that, in 2001, the UK worked very, very hard to stay there.
There have been a lot of studies on the economies of the
2001 FMD outbreak - some of which say it was worth it, in economic terms, some
of which strongly argue that it wasn't. It seems to be a close-run thing.[5]
DEFRA has, since the outbreak, acknowledged that vaccination might be a
sensible policy move faced with such an outbreak next time - vaccinations are
allowed in some circumstances by the WHO in order to bring an epidemic under
control.
In case you missed it, I'll say it again - ten million
animals were slaughtered during the FMD crisis of 2001 - the vast majority of
them being sheep. It's since been confirmed that roughly one in three of the
'suspect' diagnoses were correct. Thanks to the contiguous cull policy, with
the three-mile 'protection' zone, this means that something like ninety percent
of those slaughtered were uninfected.
Now, there's an argument to be made that all these
animals would have been slaughtered anyway - we eat them, after all. As a
counterpoint to that argument, consider this: slaughter in an abattoir is tightly
regulated and controlled in order to minimise distress and discomfort to the
animals. I have visited a number of abattoirs in my time. When it goes
smoothly, the killing is painless, and very quick. It doesn't always go smoothly.
At the height of the disease in Devon, ninety thousand
animals were being slaughtered a day. Ninety thousand. On farms. By vets, by
technicians, and by the army. If you think that it went smoothly, then I would
suggest you are a poor student of human nature. None of the abattoir
regulations were in place. Animals were not stunned prior to slaughter. They
were not insensible at the moment of death, nor were they ignorant of the
deaths around them. They were distressed, they were terrified, and then they
were killed. Vets did what they could. Farmers did what they could. But that stark
number of ten million animals, I can assure you, blurs an immense amount of suffering,
fear, pain, and death into an easy-to-swallow statistic.
Foot and Mouth is a disease of economic importance. I
stayed clean during the epidemic of 2001. Somehow, I still feel dirty.
[1]
I was very proud of remembering this point - it must have appealed to the SF
writer in me; also, I honestly did remember that it was a picornavirus.
[2]
a medical term, meaning 'it goes away by itself'
[3]
Not strictly true - there have been a few reports of direct transmission from
animals to humans, but these cases are very rare, not confirmed, and (just like
FMD itself), get better very quickly.
[4] I won't mention it again, I promise!
[5]
Here's some figures for the interested: getting the outbreak under control cost
£8-10 billion pounds. Lost revenue for allowing FMD unchecked across the UK
(and so ending up in the 'FMD present' group) could be £1.2 billion/year.
Vaccination of all herds in the country would probably cost about £150 million.
I can't find any figures for what the UK being downgraded to Group 2 would be.
