Foot and mouth
… or to continue the slaughter?
I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw George Monbiot’s Guardian article (March 29th) entitled "Foot and mouth is a good thing". Monbiot argues that the disease should be allowed to become endemic in Britain, and that the real job of MAFF should be to ensure that this happens as soon as possible.
He quotes a Masai cattle herder in sub-Saharan Africa, where animal welfare understandably takes on a different perspective than in rich countries, to argue that endemic FMD can be lived with.
Monbiot is against anything which might result in FMD’s eradication. He says: "if the vaccination programme is successful, then, as an urgent strategic priority, the government should reinfect the country forthwith". This would not be difficult, since FMD is amongst the most contagious diseases known to science.
His ‘rationale’ for this bizarre view is that it would ‘encourage farmers to develop local markets for their produce’ since it would make meat exports impossible and meat exports are unnecessary.
Meat exports may well be unnecessary in a rational world, but the idea that the way to end it is to deliberately introduce human health and animal welfare problems into the domestic meat supply is off the wall.
Animal welfare
Monbiot accepts that his policy would have implications for animal welfare and that it would reduce meat and milk production, since disease-ridden animals would be thinner and would produce less milk. The answer he says would be to cull out the worst affected animals and let the rest live with it.
But he ignores the suffering which would become routine and does not say how a cull of the worst affected could be carried out amongst the vast numbers of wild-life (mostly various species of deer) which would inevitably become infected once the disease was endemic.
It is an ill-informed argument which seeks to minimise the effects of the disease on the individual animal and minimises the general effects on animal welfare of endemic FMD - although he does not go as far as some on the left who bizarrely argue that FMD is like a mild dose of flu.
In fact the effects of FMD on different species is quite different. Cattle get the disease much more severely than pigs or sheep. A recent graphic description by a ministry vet of a cow’s tongue coming away in his hand as he tried to examine it was convincing. The lesions at the base of its tongue were so deep that the tongue was severed from the head.
Monbiot also seems to assume that humans cannot catch FMD, but this is not true. People can be infected through skin wounds or the oral mucous through handling diseased stock, contact with the virus in a laboratory, or by drinking non-pasteurised infected milk - though not by eating meat from infected animals.
The human infection is temporary and mild, but why is Monbiot so keen to minimise the problem of disease in food production?
Vaccination is the answer to FMD advocated by much of the left. There are two issues involved here: the use of vaccination to help to control an outbreak and the routine ongoing use of vaccination of all susceptible animals to prevent the disease (a huge 57m in the case of Britain). In Holland vaccination is being used as a rapid reaction (fire-break) policy, the vaccinated animals are then killed as soon as possible.
The effectiveness of vaccination is controversial. There are 40 strains of the virus on top of the virulent type O Asiatic strain involved in the present outbreak, and they mutate freely with new strains regularly emerging.
Not effective
But vaccination is not 100 per cent effective even within the right strain since some animals excrete it.
Therefore if an FMD outbreak occurs some animals will still get it and it will probably get into the wild life which cannot be vaccinated. Vaccination against FMD does not involve just one jab, but has to be repeated every six months. Potential human health problems involved seem to be ignored.
FMD is endemic in many third world countries where neither slaughter or vaccination are economically feasible since any method of prevention or eradication is hugely expensive.
Most of the rich parts of the world - North America, Australia, New Zealand, the EU and Scandinavia - have kept it out by strict regulation of food and agriculture which have to be in place against a range of deadly diseases transmittable to humans.
When it has arisen they have eradicated it by slaughter. This seems to be the most effective policy. The USA last had a case over 70 years ago in 1929. Canada had its last case in 1952. In Britain the last outbreak was in 1967.
No evidence
The case for the ongoing use of an unreliable vaccine over long periods of time is not strong. Vaccination was tried in some European countries but there it effectiveness cannot be evaluated since there is no evidence that the disease was imported during that time.
As George Monbiot points out there is a commercial case against vaccination since it results in an export ban. But there is also a food safety element - the fact that consumers want as many diseases as possible kept out of the food they eat, and many do not want to consume animals infected or vaccinated with FMD.
The issue therefore is to keep FMD out. And what makes Britain vulnerable today is the deregulation of both the farming and food production and importation. Britain is vulnerable to a range of diseases in farmyard animals - particularly BSE, FMD and swine fever. It is also vulnerable to a wide range of diseases dangerous to humans.
The problem lies in the systematic deregulation of farming and the intensification of agriculture. The increasing commodification of animals, particularly sheep, means they are shuttled around the country in vast numbers (1.3m a month) in a market which produces nothing - except profit for the dealers.
The closure of slaughter houses, and therefore longer travelling distances to slaughter, is also an issue - although many of the smaller houses were closed because they were spreading BSE. Again the absence of strict regulation was the key issue.
Stress on animals increases their susceptibility to disease, whether from travel or intensive farming methods. The numbers of government vets have been drastically reduced in recent years, along with all other government services, thus when something happens there is no one there to deal with it.
Despite the seriousness of this outbreak there has to be a sense of proportion. This imminence of a general election has shaped perceptions of this outbreak from the start.
Sensationalist
Apart from the sensationalism of the British media, the Tories have played it up to the full. They are facing defeat whether the election was May or June it was and is their one last chance of a breakthrough. Unfortunately for them it has not worked, and their unconvincing hype has actually increased Labour’s lead.
Much of the media coverage has been grotesque; concentrating on emotive images. Language such as ‘funeral pyres’ and ‘killing fields’ gives the impression of a war zone making it look as if the farming industry was about to be wiped out - and compounds the problems of the tourist industry.
In fact it has taken six weeks for the number of animals slaughtered to contain FMD to reach the 500,000 normally slaughtered each week for food production.
The main victims of this outbreak of course are many of the small farmers who were facing a severe crisis before FMD came along.
It is not just the aftermath of BSE but the high value of the pound, the globalisation of food production and the power of the supermarkets which are driving many out of the industry or deeper into penury.
Socialists must demand the reorganisation of farming on a completely new and sustainable basis. (See SO 43)