-Caveat Lector-
{{Well, that's what they get for dragging their feet with the
burning! If the cattle are not slaughtered quickly enough, the damn
things recover. How embarrassing that can be!!
~Amelia~}}
Questions arise as many foot-and-mouth cases test negative
Saturday, May 12, 2001
By EMMA ROSS
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON -- More than a quarter of supposedly confirmed cases of
foot-and-mouth in Britain tested negative in blood tests after the
livestock
had been killed, the government said as an independent report
bolstered its
claim that the epidemic is now under control.
Although officials said it was possible the livestock were at the
stage of
the disease where it would not show up in blood tests, the admission
Thursday raised new questions about the government's hurried
slaughter to
control the disease.
The Ministry of Agriculture said about 450 of 1,579 so-called
confirmed
cases of the livestock virus proved negative when blood was tested
at the
Institute for Animal Health laboratory in Pirbright, southern
England.
Of the 250 cases in which animals were slaughtered on "suspicion" of
having
the disease, only 46 -- less than one-fifth -- tested positive for
the
virus.
The disclosure was likely to provoke anger among farmers whose
livestock was
culled, but the National Farmers' Union said yesterday it wanted to
examine
the figures in more detail before passing judgment.
More than 2.6 million animals have been slaughtered in a campaign to
eradicate the highly infectious livestock disease. The Agriculture
Ministry
defended the rapid slaughter in a written statement.
"Speed of slaughter is crucial to successful control and eradication
of the
disease," it said. "Waiting for test results to come through before
taking
action would risk not bringing the outbreak under control."
The government's assertion that its culling policy has worked was
boosted
yesterday by a report in the journal Nature by researchers from the
Center
for Tropical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
The report says the disease was contained by the end of March, when
restrictions on the movement of livestock, people and vehicles
between farms
were in full force.
On April 19, the government's chief scientific adviser, David King,
had said
the epidemic was "fully under control." Prime Minister Tony Blair
said last
week that Britain was "in the home straight" in the race to
eradicate the
disease.
The researchers used a statistical calculation that measured how
many new
cases of the disease each farm was generating. They found that the
score was
3.3 at the beginning of the epidemic, meaning that each case of the
disease
was leading to three new ones elsewhere.
An epidemic can only be considered under control if the score is
less than
one, according to the journal report. That was achieved by March 30,
and the
score has been slowly declining since then, according to the
research.
Standard and Poor's credit-rating agency said yesterday that the
final cost
of the epidemic would amount to about $2.6 billion. The cull and
related
activities would cost $212 million; subsidies and tax concessions to
affected businesses $1.3 billion; and other indirect costs --
including lost
tax revenue and higher unemployment benefits -- that could reach
$966
million.
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