The disease and us

Given the boost in the opinion polls enjoyed by Gordon Brown following the recent floods, a cynic might wonder whether the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Surrey has been staged in order to give the Prime Minister an excuse to break off his holiday in Dorset and earn brownie points by taking control of a national crisis while David Cameron (who has since called off his own holiday) was lounging around on a Breton beach. That, we concede, is far-fetched, but it is not wrong to wonder whether the nation’s reaction to foot-and-mouth — which is rarely fatal in animals and causes no human symptoms whatsoever — is not a little out of proportion to the threat it poses. Victims of MRSA could be forgiven for asking why the Prime Minister doesn’t make a little more of a fuss about biosecurity in NHS hospitals.

That foot-and-mouth disease generates such fear and emotion is partly down to our national sentimentality towards animals, and partly because the last outbreak of the disease in 2001 was so badly mishandled by the government. The outbreak lasted for eight months and led to the slaughter of six million animals. The disease spread so far and wide because of the slowness of the Ministry of Agriculture in imposing restrictions on the movement of animals. Much of the economic damage, however, was caused by an hysterical over-reaction to the movement of humans once the government did act. Among the bizarre decisions made by officials was the cancellation of Crufts (dogs do not carry the disease), the virtual imprisonment of people whose homes abutted affected premises and the closure of the overwhelming majority of public footpaths in the country, in spite of the fact that many don’t go within miles of a cow, sheep or pig. The idiocy in 2001 was compounded by the failure of officials to keep tabs on the cost of the contiguous cull: in particular why the value of animals, for compensation purposes, underwent such inflation during the course of the crisis.