Taken from Dr Vernon Coleman's Health Letter

Volume 5 No 9 (April 2001)

The general panic among farmers has been inspired not by concern for animals or for the health of the general public (although, contrary to popular myth, human beings can contract foot and mouth disease) but purely for economic reasons. Beef cattle which get foot and mouth disease don’t develop at the expected rate and dairy cattle stop producing milk while they are ill. Most animals get better, but farmers can’t be bothered to nurse them when they are ill and not profitable. And so the government has to bail the farmers out by killing the sick animals and handing over lorry loads of taxpayers’ cash.

As I write there seems to be a real chance that the government will soon start killing hundreds of thousands of sheep, claiming that it is necessary to prevent the spread of this relatively mild disease.

I have a suspicion that it won’t be long before we hear that the government is planning to kill all the sheep in the country.

Is that really necessary?

Of course it isn’t.

But it occurs to me that there could be another reason for this extraordinary piece of barbarism.

As I revealed several years ago Mad Cow disease has gone back into sheep (you will remember that it originally affected cattle when they were fed bits taken from dead sheep who had been suffering from scrapie). I have seen a sheep with the disease and spoken to vets who have confirmed the diagnosis. For several years the government has been denying this and, in an attempt to hide the truth, has been confiscating, killing and burying or burning every sheep which has new style Mad Cow disease. The farmers and the politicians (and the meat industry) are terrified that if it becomes widely known that sheep now have a new variant of Mad Cow disease Britain’s meat trade will collapse completely.

Killing all the sheep in Britain would remove the problem and the evidence. And the foot and mouth epidemic will provide just the excuse the politicians have been looking for.

Foot and mouth disease is extremely infectious (it is commonly described as contagious but contagious diseases are only spread by contact and since foot and mouth disease is also spread through the air it clearly is not simply contagious) and a major economic threat to farmers and it isn’t going to go away quickly.
(Actually, it is rather inaccurate to describe it as a threat to farmers. The government will bail them out. The racecourse industry has also suffered during this crisis. Have they been offered recompense? No chance. When the weather is bad do hoteliers get a handout? Not a hope in hell.)

The ignorance and stupidity of the farming community was nicely illustrated by television news shots of farmers forcing visitors to their farms to wash their Wellington boots in disinfectant. I’m surprised that the farmers didn’t cover themselves in blood, sacrifice their first-born and dance around a big bonfire. The disease can be transmitted through the air (it has, in the past, spread across the Channel from France to England and, this time, seems likely to have spread in the opposite direction) so you don’t need much of an IQ to realise that bowls full of disinfectant aren’t really likely to make a great deal of difference to the spread of the disease. (And does disinfectant kill the virus anyway? There even seems to be some doubt about this.)

One of the most mysterious things about the whole affair has been the fact that although there is an allegedly safe, well-established and effective vaccine available I have it on reliable authority that the British government has banned farmers and vets from using it. I don’t have much faith in vaccines, but this does seem to me to be a rather odd policy for a government which is desperately keen to persuade parents to have their children vaccinated against just about every possible disease. I asked Nick Brown, the responsible government minister, to explain this. Sadly, the government seems to be still hunting for an answer. One explanation which has been put forward is that the vaccine isn’t always effective. That seems an odd excuse. On that basis we can presumably soon expect to see Ministers replacing childhood vaccination programmes with a cull of children suffering from measles and whooping cough.

Another odd thing about the foot and mouth epidemic is the way that the government and the media seemed to be ignoring the risk to human health. Contrary to popular opinion human beings can catch foot and mouth disease which can, I believe, be spread in meat and in dairy produce. (The French border authorities are currently confiscating cheese sandwiches from Britons travelling to France.) And I believe that foot and mouth disease is now in the food chain. If you eat bits taken from an animal with foot and mouth disease you may get the disease. There has never been a better time to give up eating meat. (The foot and mouth epidemic could be a huge boon to Britain’s health. The shortage of meat will save thousands of lives if it persists.)

Incidentally, the pigs who are believed to have started the whole thing are said to have caught foot and mouth through eating discarded school meals – including bits of imported meat. It is, so the experts say, probably through the imported meat that the disease got into the British farming system. (Haven’t British farmers learnt anything from the Mad Cow horror? I am astonished that farmers are still feeding meat to herbivores.)

No one seems to have asked about the children who ate the school dinners which contained the contaminated meat which gave the foot and mouth disease to the pigs. Is there a risk that some of those children may also develop foot and mouth disease? Have their parents been warned? Or is that simply too horrendous a thought for a government shortly intending to seek re-election to contemplate?
Talking of elections, the one bright spot in this whole sorry affair is the fact that the government’s clever plot to make sure that the anti-hunting bill doesn’t become law may well fail as a result of the foot and mouth crisis. It’s no secret that the government was planning to call an election on May 3rd. This may not now be possible because of the movement restrictions introduced to appease farmers. And the result of the delay could be that blood thirsty, pro-hunting members of the House of Lords will not, after all, be able to block the bill. Now, wouldn’t that be something to smile about?

Vernon Coleman

Copyright 2001