spiked-science | Article | Foot-and-mouth disease: let's come to our senses

'Stay out of the countryside' screamed the London Evening Standard on 22 February 2001. According to the Standard's front page, this was the official advice of the UK government, after the discovery of foot-and-mouth disease among pigs in the Cheale Meats abattoir in Essex, and in a bull on a nearby farm owned by the same company.

At the time of writing this article, no government press release had yet been issued on whether people should spend their weekend in the countryside or not. But on the afternoon of 22 February, the Ministry of Agriculture press office accepted that the Evening Standard's headline was a reasonable reflection of its advice - although the spokesperson was keen to stress that village pubs and town halls would be all right.

Exactly how many more cases of foot-and-mouth will occur as a result of this outbreak cannot be predicted. But the response to the limited number of cases that have occurred so far seems certain to reach epidemic proportions.

Cautionary responses to the foot-and-mouth cases have not been limited to the UK media. The Ramblers' Association, which has been in detailed consultation with the Ministry of Agriculture over this issue, is offering similar advice. According to its spokesperson, given that 'it is difficult to know whether or not farmland has livestock on it until you come across livestock, it would be better to keep off farmland altogether; we all have to play our part, whoever we are'. Which, of course, amounts to the cry, 'Stay out of the countryside'. (But the Ramblers' Association does not want to 'encourage people to sit on their butts', and suggests that those wanting a weekend break should try town or canal walks .)

Why this level of reaction - among everybody from farmers to ramblers to the UK media? Of course, foot-and-mouth disease, while having no direct and severe implications for human health, needs to be treated seriously. Yet this, it would appear, is precisely what farmers and officials involved in controlling the outbreak have been doing.

Exclusion zones have been established around the farms that sent those pigs to the Cheale Meats abattoir that were later found to be infected with foot-and-mouth disease, although the source of the outbreak has yet to be identified, and there is as yet no evidence that the pigs became infected on the farms themselves. On the morning of 22 February, the Ministry of Agriculture announced an extension to the 'exclusion zones' in Essex and north Kent, and additional restrictions to prohibit the movement of animals in and out of farms in the area.

All of this action may well be very sensible. Nobody wants a repeat of the 1967 foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, which resulted in the slaughter of close to 500,000 cattle, sheep and pigs, provoked a number of restrictions on the movement of people in the countryside, and led to a three-month ban on horse racing.

But the overall media reaction to this latest case can only be described as surreal. Faced with pages of in-depth coverage, strewn with pictures from 1967 of dead cows piled up waiting to be burned, anybody would think that we were in the middle of a huge epidemic. It is barely considered that, in the last outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 1981, the situation was brought under control very quickly - and that the same could be done again. As one Yorkshire veterinary surgeon put it, 'the Ministry of Agriculture is not overreacting - but media speculation about an outbreak on the scale of 1967 is premature. Much depends on the virulence of the particular strain of virus involved'.

Understandably, the UK National Farmers' Union (NFU) has tried to galvanise sympathy for the farmers. NFU president Ben Gill responded to news of a ban on British meat exports on 21 February by declaring it a necessary evil, but one that 'will be devastating for us - it is like staring into the abyss'. On 22 February, Gill described the situation facing British farmers as 'desperate'; and despite stating that 'people should remain calm', he insisted that 'we need to ensure that everybody is vigilant'.

Yet while Gill pleaded that people should 'not go onto farms, or near farms anywhere in Britain at this stage', he also attempted to use the press attention about foot-and-mouth to plug the benefits of buying British meat, and to sow seeds of doubt about imported food. 'Is it a coincidence that we had classical swine fever in East Anglia last year of an Asian origin, and we now have foot-and-mouth in East Anglia, again of an Asian origin?', he asked. 'We are now all exposed to imports of food�in quantities we have not before experienced.'

The NFU's pronouncements reflect an attempt to use this situation to get the public behind British farmers, and to point the finger at foreign meat. But the danger with this strategy is that talking up the possibility of imminent catastrophe can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just remember the BSE scare in 1996 - the consequences of which continue to reverberate across the UK and Europe.

And as we also learned from the BSE scare, when a panic reaches epidemic proportions, nobody wins. This outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease should be taken seriously - but it must also be kept in perspective.

Tony Gilland is science and society director at the Institute of Ideas. He is the editor of Science: Can You Trust the Experts?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); Animal Experimentation: Good or Bad?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); and Nature's Revenge?: Hurricanes, Floods and Climate Change, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). He is also a contributor to Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).

Read on: Foot-and-mouth: 'People have overreacted' by Tony Gilland

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