Warmwell

"...if we go the way of the coal and steel industries, there will be no way back.."

2008-02-25T10:30:00.011+01:00

"if you want to see the future, just look at the west coast of Scotland .. the farmers had no other industry to rely on, ...all the animals have gone..." In the New Year, Alistair Davy and other farmers from Yorkshire were quoted in an article in the Yorkshire Post

" .... if the sheep and the cows are no longer grazing, it wouldn't take long for it to become impenetrable with bracken and bramble. For the last few years, the true picture of the problems facing agriculture have been masked...

"This is the last push," said Mr Davy. "I'm not doing it for me, I'm doing it for my son and for all those future generations who want to work. We are the last of the great industries to be wrecked, but if we go the way of the coal and steel industries, there will be no way back."

It is no longer a secret that the present UK government would like to be shot of farming altogether. On the January 3rd Today programme we heard that meetings convened by Defra had discussed whether UK farming was needed at all. Defra has dropped the word 'farming' from its title and, as global recession is at last being openly talked about, the UK government still talks glibly of being in a "post agricultural era" and seems to be worrying about one problem only. As British Wool Chairman, Frank Langrish, has said

"It's all part of Defra's policy to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases. The UK government believes a reduction in livestock numbers will have a marked effect on the statistics. This is the logic of the asylum, where the lunatics are now completely in charge."

The Treasury has no apparent interest in supporting farmers in a particularly difficult time and what little money there is for DEFRA is not going to be spent on helping to ensure the supply of safe home produced food. Instead, as Christopher Booker put it in Sunday's Telegraph, our leaders are committing us to a range of measures whose economic effects will be without precedent, particularly the astronomically costly "carbon trading" schemes - put in place at the very time when many now believe that global warming has considerably more to do with unusual sunspot activity than with CO2 emissions. And the newspaper www.thisiscornwall.co.uk put it like this

:"Environment Secretary Hilary Benn last night signalled a significant shift away from supporting farming and rural areas as his department vowed to focus its funding priorities on tackling climate change. Support for rural and farming businesses will be scrapped in favour of funding eco-projects in Africa and bankrolling inventions to provide alternatives to fossil fuels...."

One disastrous consequence of DEFRA's obsession with such things is that they have virtually lost the plot in controlling the animal diseases that threaten our livestock and our own, already dwindling, self sufficiency. The warmwell.com Bluetongue page catalogues a long series of blunders in the UK and EU as well as the inevitable march of the viral disease itself - a disease that appears to have spread as a result of global trading rather than global warming. What we are seeing with Bluetongue now is the result of a dithering ignorance and political game playing from the EU and from the governments of Member States that threaten the livestock industry of the whole of Northern Europe. It is an international problem, not - as one might believe from the brief insoucient articles in the UK press - merely a temporary problem for the farmers of England.

Once again, as with foot and mouth, we are seeing the results of

"... the unfounded suspicion that somehow vaccination allows animals to be infectious whilst concealing signs of clinical disease."

In her talk to farmers on the subject of Bluetongue last Friday, the virologist and farmer Dr Ruth Watkins spoke, with all the well founded frustration of the expert, about "the redundant rule" that vaccination is not allowed in the surveillance zone nor outside the surveillance zone in uninfected areas.

"... Why should we be afraid of using vaccination to prevent virus infection from spreading and establishing itself in new areas? Is this because of an unfounded suspicion that somehow vaccination allows animals to be infectious whilst concealing signs of clinical disease? We are back in the mid 20th century if we continue to act as though we are unable to diagnose virus infection unless we wait for a clinical case to take samples to the virology laboratory."

Her talk (new window) is clear and informative, should be printed out and read in full. What she says is an eye-opener too about why we are having to play catch-up with the disease, why vaccine production in Europe has been so long delayed and why vaccination is going to be incomplete until far more vaccine can be ordered and obtained and 95% coverage of domestic ruminants achieved. On the subject of DEFRA's decision to make cash-strapped farmers pay for vaccine and costs themselves, Ruth Watkins simply quotes the example of Jenner and the elimination of smallpox.

Jenner who was a country doctor, a general practitioner, was the first person to use a live vaccine virus to protect humans against smallpox in 1876.... The original live virus vaccine was taken from the udder of a cow called Blossom whose hide is framed and hangs on the library wall at St George’s Hospital where Jenner trained. Jenner foresaw and wrote that it would be possible to eradicate smallpox entirely from the world one day, and he was proven correct in 1977 when global eradication was declared complete. Global eradication would never have happened if each person had had to pay for their vaccine and their tests for smallpox."

The rich will always be with us: and they are buying up our farms

2008-02-10T10:46:00.000+01:00

Increases of up to 40 per cent in the price of UK farmland in 2007.
This Times article The hedge fund manager who bought a farm
(Feb 1) shows that big investors are "hurriedly moving their wealth out of stocks and shares and into farmland...."
For the rest of us, recession looms. Once again one is tempted to repeat in the tones of Cassandra the wise words of Richard Heinberg:

"Get thee to the productive side of the economy. Grow something, or learn to make or repair something useful."

The Times article suggests that, "Across the world, hedge fund managers, property developers and other investors" are all ready to buy up British farmland. The government's short-sightedness is allowing livestock farming to fade away, leaving the UK dependent upon cheap imports that may soon become very much scarcer - but the rich will always be with us, ready to profit from the situation.

Barton Briggs, one of Wall Street's most legendary investment strategists, is advising the rich and powerful to buy up farms and stock them with "seed, fertiliser, canned food. wine, medicine. clothes etc." (and the "etc" would seem to mean guns to keep away the rest of us. See also below)

"The key is going to be agriculture"
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph on Thursday was one of the first mainstream journalists to point out the grim corollary between oil depletion and famine. He quotes Jeff Currie of US investment bank Goldman Sachs:

"We have never seen this before when commodity prices were already at record highs. Over the next 18 to 36 months we are probably going into crisis mode across the commodity complex.
The key is going to be agriculture. China is terrified of the current situation. It has real physical shortages," he said, referencing China still having memories of starvation in the 1960s seared in its collective mind...."

The graph in the article showing the projected increase of land use for biofuels gives a stark picture of how biofuels made from grain, oil seed and sugar are drawing away food supplies at a time when the population of the world is still expanding by 70 million a year. Goldman Sachs forecasts that oil will be priced at $105 a barrel by the end of 2008.

Meanwhile, DEFRA is increasingly deprived of funding and the UK government is shrugging off its responsibility towards home grown food, farming and food safety. Relying on cheap imports that may become ever scarcer seems unwise.

One sure sign of the coming world food crisis brought on by environmental problems and increasingly scarce water supplies is the ever reducing major grain supplies - and China's present trauma.

The monetary system upon which Mr Brown relies is really just a reflection of our energy system and that is designed for one thing: growth. Growth requires a constantly increasing supply of energy. And now, peak oil is more and more referred to by those who pooh-poohed it only a few months ago. The dash to produce biofuels is pushing up food prices and, it seems, even adding to carbon emissions - as do giant wind turbines.

In denial of the urgent challenges
The report, Realizing Britain's Potential: Future Strategic Challenges for Britain purports to "outline the key long-term strategic challenges facing the UK"
Gordon Brown says,

" the real success stories in the coming years will be those nations that harness the skills of their people, attracting more than their share of the top global jobs and mobilizing the talents of all. I have referred to this as the Skills Race - a race we can win, and we must win."

As the world lurches towards recession (quite impervious to the pronouncements of the Prime Minister), we do indeed need fast, urgent action - but cooperative action, not a race. It's going to take more than "top, global jobs"; it is going to take a new direction from the bottom up.

To deny the desperate real global challenges faced by human beings in Britain as well as worldwide - energy, food and the environment - is simply to hasten civilisation's destruction. We have never been so urgently in need of good, safe, home grown food (and never less in need of empty political rhetoric harking back to a system that is more and more irrelevant.)

A momentary glimpse....

2007-12-22T12:22:00.000+01:00

"it was interesting that I hadn’t come close to understanding the trauma these people were experiencing...” David King

Interesting use of an interestingly neutral adjective by the departing CSA, who, this article in the Times today reveals, wept during a play about foot and mouth seven years after his influence had carried out "a cull of millions of animals to stop the outbreak". Interesting that journalists still do not - apparently - understand what did and what did not "stop the outbreak".

As Dr Alex Donaldson's submission to the Lessons Learned Inquiry pointed out:

"....The epidemic had been in decline by the time of the introduction of the contiguous cull policy on 29 March. .."

It is interesting that the massive scale of contiguous slaughter, which involved 10,400 farms and at the very least 6·5 million livestock, was largely unnecessary. Fewer than 1500 of 2030 ‘infected premises’ that were tested in the lab were actually confirmed as being infected.

These are the statistics that are fading, helped on their way by that very human wish to airbrush out the unthinkable.

All the same, the policy, so heavily influenced by Sir David King, resulted in the unnecessary involvement of over 7200 premises (69 per cent of all premises affected) and the unnecessary slaughter of at least 3·35 million animals(52 per cent of all recorded slaughters),and an excess cost of at least £1700 million(62 per cent of the declared net cost to the UK taxpayer).(See Vet Record Aug 5 2006)

But it is Christmas. We do not want to remember the scenes of utter shambles, the terror and misery resulting in the grief that Sir David allowed himself to share, so interestingly and just for a brief moment, seven years on.

How much better to dwell instead on the gentle scenes of human and animal kindness that feature still - thank God - in so many Christmas cards.

Even so, let it never be forgotten that the Slaughter of the Innocents did take place - it still does and it still will - until some deeper awareness replaces the politics at the heart of animal disease control.

The mass terror of 2001 was not - the authors' eulogy notwithstanding - imposed for any necessary reason, needing the steely determination of someone resolutely deaf to - as the the Times article by Mark Henderson and Helen Rumbelow so interestingly puts it - "... the emotional pleas of protesters".

Hmmm. "Emotional"... Unlike "interesting", here is a word packed with sub text. These days, has not such an adjective become synonymous with "hysterical" - that push-button word, much used by a propaganda machine that ought to be thoroughly ashamed of itself? But this kind of shame has become out of place and out of date among those whose actions take so little heed of those upon whom they impact. So it is "interesting" to get a glimpse into the mind of one to whom emotional pleas are wholly irrelevant and certainly not, seven years on, any reason for self doubt or humility - but to whom, just for a moment, comes the sudden pricking of tears.

(See also warmwell blogspot: "Seven Pillars of Piffle")

Baaa ..... Humbug!

2007-12-21T21:33:00.000+01:00

The cold winds do blow and we shall have snow ....and the Bluetongue midges - according to DEFRA decree today - will bite no more for a while. At least, this is what we and the midges have been told and the farmers, desperate to do some moving of stock at last, are not going to argue.

But what about the future of those sheep still abiding in the fields? How are they to be kept from succumbing to the Bluetongue infection-carrying culicoides of next Spring?

In its usual mixture of ponderous bossiness and defensiveness, DEFRA says:

"In keeping with the principles set out in the Bluetongue Control Strategy,which was developed in partnership with the farming industry, livestock keepers will be offered the opportunity to purchase vaccine from the vaccine bank..."

Which is all very well if you are one of the relatively well-off cattle farmers. Values have held up this year and will be expected to continue to do so next year. A farmer with a thousand head of beef cattle or 500 dairy cattle can be thought wealthy compared to the sheep farmers. But a sheep farm with a thousand ewes is not a wealthy farm at all. It's running at a loss and this year has been disastrous.

If we consider such a farm with 1000+ adult sheep, there will be nearly 2000 lambs just at the very time that bluetongue is going to return with a vengeance - as it did in Northern Europe this year. The virulence of its return there took everyone by surprise. If the vaccine is ready, now that a firm order has at last been placed by England (Wales has now ordered 2.5 million doses but Scotland has ordered none as far as we know,) 2 doses per animal at 50p a dose is the best case scenario. Sheep farmers like this then will be required to find £3000 to protect their animals. If vaccine turns out to be £1 a dose they will need £6000 - but these are animals who are worth pitiful amounts now.

The sheep farmers simply cannot afford it.

DEFRA seems wilfully ignorant of just how miserable the past months and years have been. Even more sheep farmers will give up - and having to take the decision to do so will be the worst kind of painful nightmare for them.

And for the country? We tend to take for granted the rural way of life and the sights and sounds of upland Britain. The uplands are there; a pastoral idyll to believe in. Most of us do not have to work to maintain it. But we treasure it and life is better just knowing that it is there.

How many people realise that an entire way of life is on a knife edge and the uplands could soon disappear? Does DEFRA understand this? As the Yorkshire farmer Alistair Davy says,

" if you want to see the future, just look at the west coast of Scotland .. the farmers had no other industry to rely on, ...all the animals have gone ......if the sheep and the cows are no longer grazing, it wouldn't take long for it to become impenetrable with bracken and bramble. For the last few years, the true picture of the problems facing agriculture have been masked..."

And why are the sheep farmers being told to pay when they simply do not have the means? The EU Commissioners have agreed to fund the first year's vaccination campaign with 100% costs of vaccines and 50% of the costs.

When DEFRA officialdom was challenged on this, the reply came back that if the UK accepted this offer there would be “other costs that would probably be greater". "Other costs" ?

Perhaps one reason why DEFRA has been so very silent on the question of the Brussels offer is because funding for vaccination is conditional on the traceability of the vaccinated animals. The EU has been very sniffy indeed about the UK's dithering over this. The UK's plans for a National Livestock database has been sputtering along for years.

In 2004, "Identifying and Tracking Livestock in England " was published by the National Audit Office (pdf). Pages 45 and 46 of that document show how - for years on end - previous reports from several different concerned bodies, had followed one after another, all urging an efficient system of traceability. In spite of this endless procession of good intentions, nothing of worth materialised. In February 2004, following the NAO report, the Public Accounts Committee gave Sir Brian Bender and co the sort of hard time that never gets reported in the media and ought to be. One Treasury Minute response to the PAC conclusions also makes fascinating reading. Mr Gerry Steinberg, Labour MP for the city of Durham, prophetically asked Sir Brian Bender:

"You will not be coming back in two years' time and saying 'Well, the IT was difficult, we could not get the software'....?"

That was 2004. Sir Brian couldn't get the software.....

But it's the farmers who must now pay for this and other catalogues of failure.

We have to vaccinate the sheep. Other European countries are not in our situation. There, the cattle far outnumber the sheep and vaccinating the cattle and some sheep should confer a degree of protection on the whole animal population. 80% will do it. But in Britain the ratio of cattle to sheep is more like 25:75, the other way round. If sheep farmers can't afford to vaccinate then the sheep are not going to be vaccinated. That means that even if the cattle farmers do vaccinate the disease is not going to be stopped. Where are DEFRA's "other costs" then? It will cost many animals their lives and farmers their livelihoods. It will cost us the uplands. Bluetongue will be the death of sheep farming unless we can get the sheep vaccinated.

Cannot some way be found simply to by-pass DEFRA with all its inefficiency, its failure to comprehend farming, disease and its pitifully inadequate grasp of technology, virology and vaccination? Unless funding can somehow pass direct from the EU to the sheep farmers this will be the last Christmas for many whose simple satisfaction was to see their sheep safely graze.

Seven pillars of piffle

2007-12-05T19:00:00.000+01:00

The Science and Technology Committee (which now must be termed the "Innovation, Universities and Skills Committee" for reasons hard to fathom) has been taking evidence on the role of the Government Chief Scientific Adviser from Sir David King, today. The parallel universe that he inhabits is rather an odd one.

Here are some of the royal gems:

Ignorance is best.

Sir David asserted that he was better at challenging people on subjects he was unfamiliar with, such as epidemiology, as he was "able to keep some distance from the issue".

Killing animals because the computer says so is good

When asked what the best moments had been as Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David replied that it was "demonstrating that science could offer a solution to the foot and mouth outbreak". It had showed how complex phenomena could be computer-modelled, he said. (That it showed too that a government could, with advice from a group that was neither expert nor accountable, manage to slaughter over 10 million animals and cause rural trauma the effects of which still reverberate - was not mentioned.)

Upsetting Number 10 is bad but telling people that global warming is bad is good.

Sir David said that he regretted the phrase "global warming was a bigger threat than global terrorism" because Number 10 had "made its displeasure well known". However, he added that the result of the statement was a growing "acceptance of the threat of climate change". One wonders if he had cast a glance at the article today on Sunspot activity in today's Independent. It might have made him a little less adamant about the current dogmas.

Cuts are increases.

Sir David said that the 'flooding study' had produced an increase in funding for the Environment Agency's work. No mention of the swingeing cuts to be borne by the same Agency, expected to cut £14.9m on flood defences and £9m on environmental protection. (Guardian) The poor cash-strapped Environment Agency is now seriously proposing abandoning the maintenance of established defences - which will leave farmland and isolated homes even more vulnerable to flooding in counties such as Suffolk.

Foot and Mouth policy has "science" embedded in it and is evidence-based.

When the Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris asked if the Government's use of evidence had improved over recent years, Sir David said that Foot and mouth disease had been "a good example of this". Comparing the 2007 and 2001 outbreaks he said that "Science had been embedded in the thinking on high-profile, high-risk issues". No one seems to have pressed him to explain the meaning of that statement.

DEFRA's amazing progress

On the question of raising the profile of science within Government departments, Sir David said that in DEFRA, 'amazing' progress had been made. No one seems to have asked him what this meant either. He did however say that Pirbright "needed rebuilding". Was he saying this before the disastrous leak in August? (See Times)

GM modification of crops. Very, very good for us all.

Brian Iddon asked why Sir David was raising the issue of GM food again. David King said that the issue had "matured" and that there was now a better information base on the health and biodiversity issues involved. He did not elaborate. New crop technologies would be needed to feed the world's growing population, he asserted - evidently not concerned by arguments such as those by a contributor to the FAO's Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture, Professor El-Tayeb, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Industrial Biotechnology at Cairo University who says:

"..currently available (GMO's) mostly contribute negatively to poverty alleviation and food security and positively to the stock market."

Well, it will soon be goodbye from Sir David. Like the log entries of the Starship Enterprise, the legacy of his tenure will be properly chronicled one day and people will marvel. Meanwhile, where will he boldly go? He denies that he is taking up a post in the Bio-tech industry. But undoubtedly Brave New Worlds await him and we wish him God's speed on his journey away - Warp Factor 8 at the very least.

Chickening Out

2007-11-30T02:49:00.000+01:00

The attempt to discredit organic production and deny poultry breeders the right to vaccinate against bird flu may have deeper implications.
In America, a website called The Center for Global Food Issues, a project of the conservative think-tank the Hudson Institute, unashamedly promotes biotech in agriculture and tries hard to debunk organic production. "When will the world realize that Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund are trying to roll back modern civilization ...?" it asks.
Now it is saying:

"Let's give up on that "free-range" label and keep ourselves and birds protected from the avian flu. Keep them indoors."

Warmwell has already received a worried email from a reader in America asking about the validity of such CGFI claims as

".. indoor birds are more comfortable than their free-range cousins because they're protected from hot sun and fierce winter. ...indoor birds are unlikely to get or spread the flu to each other, or to us".

It will be remembered that the government's chief scientist and biotech advocate, Sir David King, has always led the charge to blame wild birds for H5N1. From the start of the bird flu scare at Holton in February he blamed wild birds as the source of the infection. Last year he declared that bird flu could mean the end of free-range and organic chicken and turkey farming (link).

As Magnus Linklater wrote,

"What is disturbing about so many of the statements coming out of Defra about the need to bring free-range flocks indoors, to end organic farming, to "monitor" but never to introduce vaccination - is that they are made by people with little first-hand knowledge of the one science they should be on top of: virology."

In April 2006 an email from two virologists warning that the UK still had insufficient or no H5N1 influenza vaccine stocks, pointed out that it is essential to have clinical virologists working alongside veterinarians, advising the UK government. They made it clear, back in April 2006, that "the failure to prepare reflects a lack of understanding of viral disease in DEFRA and government and has implications for human disease risk."

Now we see that, following the preliminary epidemiologic report into the Norfolk H5N1 outbreak, both wild birds and organic farming are again back in the firing line. Although all 31 references to wild birds in the report make clear that H5N1 infection has not been detected "nor have any incidents of high mortality been observed in the area" the epidemiological report says the Norfolk strain had a 99.8% identity to the isolates from "wild birds" in June and July 2007 in the Czech Republic. However, in an email today, Alan Beat of smallholders.org.uk, quotes the FAO report which says that the Czech outbreak

"started on a commercial turkey farm on 21st June holding 1800 birds. On 10th July, a single infected dead wild mute swan was found some distance away."

Although the epidemiological report mentions the single mute swan it does not mention the conclusion of the FAO investigation that the source was more likely to have been the turkey farms - i.e. not to the farms via birds but the other way round:

"the disease has spilled over from the turkey farms in the Czech Republic resulting in wild bird infections."

Yet Fred Landeg told journalists: "At the present time wild birds, most likely migratory species from central Europe, cannot be ruled out as the source of infection" The BBC's first obedient headline? "Flu cases 'linked to wild birds". It is both interesting and reassuring that this has now changed to "Bird flu cause probe inconclusive"
Even more heartening is the campaign by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall to put pressure on the poultry industry to raise its standards. Chicken Out! is being led by River Cottage locals, especially in and around Axminster, who are boycotting intensively-reared chickens and choosing free range instead. This is a splendid initiative and people are signing up all the time.

"an odd way to save money"

2007-11-25T12:17:00.000+01:00

The latest way DEFRA intends to save money: a £300 million "voluntary retirement" scheme to any DEFRA employee over 50 who wants to jump ship.
There is much jostling on the decks.
As one insider, quoted by the Evening Standard comments:

"They can't believe their luck. There are retirement parties all the time stretching into next spring. It seems an odd way to save money but no one is complaining. Some intend to take the money and then work in the private sector."

£300 million is also the amount of the fine Defra was ordered to pay by the EU for its shambolic handling of the RPA

£220,000 was the sum in tenders received in October 2006 for vital repairs to Pirbright

£520 million is what the failure to make the Pirbright site secure cost the sheep industry

£3.7 billion is, according to Lord Rooker, DEFRA's overall budget

The headline chosen for the Evening Standard: "Staff offered £40,000-a-year for life 'bribes' to quit shamed ministry Defra" Interesting that only the word "bribes" appears inside inverted commas; the word "shamed" can stand naked and alone. And as the ship of shame glugs its way further and further down into the muddied waters we are left wondering what will become of those so entangled by DEFRA's controlling ropes that they are unable to take any of the actions needed to save themselves.

Competent authority

2007-11-24T02:14:00.001+01:00

Government cuts, mergers and attempts to save money are all horribly and visibly coming home to roost. Something has got to change before we all explode with frustration. Has not getting involved in politics become the new political correctness? Is that why we let this destructiveness continue? 62% of Britons aged 18-24 now "believe in" horoscopes, apparently. But considerably more of us seem to have been content to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast. We believed that experts were running the country, that newspapers told the truth, terrorists were all around us, government secrecy was necessary for security, processes were too complicated to understand and any kind of public protest both fruitless and really rather embarrassing.

But when people start noticing that the Emperor's credibility has finally lost its elastic and is crumpled around his ankles, this is surely a time to act. Our docile handing over to such a naked dullard the responsibility for our lives needs looking at. It is time to reclaim common sense.

The personal details of 25 million people sent from the HMRC offices at Washington's Waterview Park to the National Audit Office by courier disappeared, taking with them with the very last shred of confidence in a government ID scheme. Had the HMRC not heard of Access Control? The technology exists to make systems safe. But then, cutting edge technology seems only to have reality in the private sector along with management skill, creative thinking and rigour. In the public sector what we see are cuts.

The Treasury has funded small-minded policies with a big tight fist. As more cuts are made and more jobs go, morale of the staff reaches an all time low. This has been true at DEFRA for years now. In a Department that has become more and more politicised, the rank and file of DEFRA staff have kept their heads down near their boots - and, from all we hear, their spirits have been even lower.

But the Army, Navy and Air Force have much greater power to raise concern. When no fewer than five ex-service Chiefs angrily and very publicly deplore cost cutting, lack of understanding and government contempt for its personnel, newspaper headlines start seriously to reflect a national unease. Lord Boyce in the House of Lords, put it rather well:

"The smoke and mirrors work of the Government and, in particular the Treasury, actually means that the core defence programme has had no effective budget rise at all."

Sure enough, up popped Des Browne to proclaim on the Today programme that black is white, day is night and

"We have in the UK the second highest defence budget in the world in real terms."

These real terms are as real as Hilary Benn's commitment to meat and two veg. - or his assertion that "Working in partnership with the farming community has been an integral part of our approach..." There has been precious little partnership with anyone in the past years and funding has been the meagre pittance that a Treasury, wholly indifferent to rural and farming concerns, has seen fit to toss to the despised Department. It is Treasury cuts, mainly overseen by our present Prime Minister, that have resulted in our lamentable animal health record: a woeful lack of resources has given us a third rate level of expertise, lack of state of the art diagnostics, rotten surveillance and a defensive attitude from the heirarchy that will brook no criticism.

Meanwhile, animals go up in smoke and farmers go out of business.

Which all brings us back to the home life of our own dear DEFRA and the spectacle of Helen Ghosh, Defra's Permanent Secretary of State, and her attempt to repackage the swingeing cuts that everybody knows are going to be made. Wearing one of her Department's white exterminator's suits she bludgeoned the English language into insensibility:

"It's just a reprioritising exercise against a new strategy."

And poor Hilary Benn, looking more and more like a bewildered aunt from the world of P.G.Wodehouse, has also caught the DEFRAspeak virus. Of the plan to get farmers to bail out DEFRA after so much expensive failure (the RPA managed to send out a cheque for one penny this week) Mr Benn talks of farmers becoming "much more deeply involved in the key policy and operational decisions" and that formal proposals on disease cost and responsibility sharing will be put out for consultation ‘before Christmas’.

Spare us the consultation.Of course those who pay for them must be deeply involved in "key policy and operational decisions". And for this to happen we need to get free from the tyranny of a Department that murders animals and the English language.

The EU likes to refer to "competent authorities" but this is now a contradiction in terms. Europe's massive one-size-fits-all mentality needs some trenchant downsizing. We need a panel of independent experts who understand the science and technology, can manage people and funding and who are not allergic to change. Such a new kind of group to keep things grown-up, rigorous and efficient is long overdue. Its members must be seen to be independent of the government and they must, with DEFRA but not answerable to DEFRA, set the Performance Bechmarks by which policy is judged. We need them - and they need clout enough to tell DEFRA where it needs to go.

Post script. Cuts at DEFRA? Not for officials in Suffolk

When Vincent Cable spoke in the House of Commons about the 24 billion pounds-worth of public money used to bail out Northern Rock, he pointed out that this amounts to £900 for every taxpayer. Our money, it seems, can be found when it is needed. And where it has also been needed lately, apparently, is to accommodate DEFRA officials in some of Suffolk's most prestigious and expensive hotels more than 20 miles from the site of the H5N1 outbreak. The East Anglian Daily Times tells us that the officials are staying at the Ickworth Hotel in Bury St Edmonds. This is a hotel which charges £310.00 for dinner, bed and breakfast in a "standard double" room. DEFRA is not revealing how many of its staff are staying there nor what the price tag will be. Its "accommodation needs" are handled by the private company,Expotel.

At a time when family and tenant farmers are in such deep distress, and DEFRA is being pressured to make savings of £270m. this decision to flaunt such wads of cash might be considered unwise.

Paying the Piper

2007-11-20T00:02:00.000+01:00

Paying the piper should mean calling the tune - not reluctantly dancing to the government's limited repertoire - so often a danse macarbre.

This is what, in DEFRASpeak, the government would have us believe:

"Government works in partnership with stakeholders to help us arrive at policy decisions that reflect a robust, fair and cost-effective approach taking into account and balancing stakeholder perspectives..."

In a pig's ear.

DEFRA listens to farmers only if they happen to be one of the so-called "core" stakeholders. Do most farmers have any idea who these people are, let alone feel represented by them? As for other 'stakeholders', prepared to give up time to attend Defra meetings and offer views and advice, too often one hears complaints about meetings getting scheduled at oddly inconvenient times, papers arriving too late to be read beforehand, minutes not being taken, meetings not efficiently chaired, questions not answered, time wasted and outcomes disappointing.

DEFRA's management skills, in short, are non existent. Such incompetence and contempt.

And yet it could all be so different. The best blueprint I have seen on the subject of Industry Cost Sharing is the paper by Roger Breeze with its suggestion that 'Performance Benchmarks' should be established for both sides. If the government failed in any of its parts of the bargain, failed to meet its Performance Benchmarks, then payment could not be demanded. If farmers failed to keep to what had been jointly decided then there would be pre-agreed penalities.

There would be accountability.

The serious and possible suggestion is this:

With all Performance Benchmarks met, by government and industry, the goal is to snuff out an outbreak in two weeks after diagnosis by active commitment of all sections of the industry and related industries.

Such a levy would give cause for real optimism. All those involved in farm to fork food production would share responsibility for safety and disease control.

But what farmers fear is that it will not be like this at all. 2007 has been a relentlessly terrible year. Can anyone deny that trust is at an all time low; confidence in the Ministry long since lost in a fog of disillusionment? If a levy on farmers goes ahead without genuine power sharing it will be taxation without representation at an almost undreamed of level.

With a savage twist of the knife, the Ministry will be telling the very farmers it has bossed, bamboozled and bankrupted that they themselves must pay for all that threatens to put paid to their very existence.

Consider the birds of the air

2007-11-18T17:40:00.000+01:00

Poor old farmers. Can there be a more smeared and sneered at group in Britain - or one that has had so much thrown at it in so short a time? And are journalists really unable to see a difference between farmers (people who farm)and those grotesque agri-barons who treat animals as mere parcels of protoplasm to be crammed behind the high walls of factories? Or is it all part of some campaign smiled upon by Downing Street and upheld by Fleet Street that has kept public sympathy away from farmers for so long? In the Observer, for example, we read yet another paragraph implying that farmers bring problems upon themselves:

".... Some disease outbreaks, however, have been caused by clear lapses in biosecurity on farms. The bird flu found at a Bernard Matthews plant last year was traced back to its plant in Hungary..."

The Holton outbreak had nothing to do with 'farms' and everything to do with the dangerous and miserable practice of turning animal husbandry into dreary mass production.

So many disease outbreaks are making people wonder more and more about the health of the animals themselves - and they are beginning to question the ethics of the huge producers. Farmers who farm are thus a problem for the factory barons and they are "demanding" change. Those enterprises that still make contact with nature make them "incensed" apparently. Consider the birds of the air. Valerie Elliott's Times article on Friday concluded:

"Poultry farmers are incensed by what they perceive as lax biosecurity at the farm which allowed turkeys, geese and ducks to mingle with wild birds near an ornamental lake. Many are now demanding new rules for free-range and organic birds and for the Government to regulate rather than offer guidance ...."

Such "farmers" would indeed love to see yet more regulation tangling up the lives of those who produce free range hens and eggs. Such dastardly laxity, such "mingling" between the free and the enslaved must be outlawed for good.

Interesting that on the 13th November the 'spread by wild birds' theory was the first to be trotted out in relation to the finding of H5N1 at Redgrave Park farm in Suffolk. It was the same story at Bernard Matthews too in February. If it is said enough times, will people forget the self-evident fact that overcrowding breeds disease? Where a virus can mingle among so many it can mutate. On Friday night, at a public meeting in the Diss area, someone from Defra confirmed that tests on wild birds have shown no signs of bird flu at all. Suspicion that the virus was imported - as it was last time - is inescapable. It looks certain that, back in February, the Bernard Matthews factory imported the H5N1 virus as a result of the utterly mad to-ing and fro-ing of carcases and meat products between the UK and Hungary. Free-range poultry keepers were inconvenienced and worried for weeks as a result.

What was it that allowed the Holton factory not to be prosecuted? Dangerous practices were ignored. Why was the Bernard Matthews factory actually compensated by taxpayers to the tune of something like £600,000? Cui bono? One Holton statement said

"... we will not be complacent because bird flu did strike us. Together with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) we're working hard to learn all we can from this episode "

Unfortunately, in the area of animal disease, the UK's record on learning lessons is pitiful. The Bernard Matthews outbreak left many questions unanswered . Free range poultry owners are not going to be allowed to protect their birds with vaccines because of the old mantra, rolled out yet again a few days ago that "....it is possible that some vaccinated birds would still be capable of transmitting the disease if they became infected whilst not displaying symptoms...." Dr Ruth Watkins says this is not true if the whole flock is vaccinated. And who in their right mind would suggest vaccinating only a few?

"If 3 weeks has passed since commencing the vaccine course (2 doses) (or the time stated by the manufacturers for full immunity) then there will be a solid immunity in the flock. We are not talking about vaccinating an already infected flock."

Intensive factory farms seem set to go on transforming the miserably short, unnatural lives of farmed poultry into vacuum packed meat products for the supermarkets. That the cost of all this is much too high must surely now be self evident.

In East Anglia the high densities of poultry and of pigs is a disaster waiting to happen. It is regulation of the intensive exploitation of food animals that is needed - not only because industrial scale production is cruel but because it is dangerous. And we need a vaccination policy.

It is about Democracy, dammit

2007-11-12T16:00:00.000+01:00

When faced for the second time round with a dreary old "lessons to be learned" government review, can one summon the will to live, let alone pick up a pen?

Last time, a ProMed Moderator remarked tactfully

" the Lessons to be Learned Inquiry, had obviously to manoeuvre within a politically challenged landscape..."

You bet it did; a desert landscape with anxious vultures.
For how long can an Inquiry Chairman, sitting on his branch and appointed as a safe pair of hands, listen to howls of grief and anger about his political masters? Not very long. A quick swoop and the flesh of criticism is reduced to dry bones and dust and quietly forgotten. The sloughing off of reproach reached giddy heights during an interview on the Today Programme, December 18 2001 when the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government,David King, blandly announced:

"What I was happy to achieve in the FMD outbreak was showing that science in real time could provide a sound basis for policy advice."

Instead of falling dead on the spot he then went on to tell Jim Naughtie that the portable on-site RT-PCR diagnostic kit offered to the UK by ARS Tetracore in the US -(used successfully in Uruguay in the very same year)

"is based on a very well known technique...that technique has now been proven not to be capable of being validated..."

Not "validated"? For six years these simple to handle portable machines have been used by the US military to save lives and to track and destroy pathogens.

It is very evident that DEFRA's ignorance of virology, of vaccination, of farming and of animals is part of the reason for their institutionalised secrecy: they do not wish to be challenged. As for the Chief Scientific Advisor whose fell hand can be seen behind this year's policy, he may well have expertise in surface chemistry but - as the NFU's Anthony Gibson has said - he has no understanding of what was suffered by farmers who were forced to watch the destruction of entire pedigree herds in their farmyards.

"To him it appears to be a dry statistical exercise, whereas to those involved it was flesh, blood, tears, sweat and heartbreak."

In 2002 the official inquiries, anxious not to whisper criticisms too loudly at those great ones who had made such an unholy, bloody, fiasco of things listed some gentle recommendations. They were the lessons to be learned.

DEFRA did not learn them.

So, yet again, here are the Lessons to be Learned about coping with a foot and mouth outbreak.

1. Don't let virus escape.
It really didn't have to. Animal Disease Research should have been properly funded and the concerns of its experts listened to.
Pirbright's Professor Martin Shirley told the Science and Technology Select Committee earlier this year.

".....flat funding during the past three years for the Reference Laboratories (ie a significant cut in real terms) has meant that key areas of work, including some critical state-of-the art diagnostics, has to be undertaken by PhD students at the very beginning of their research training.....Year on year, we are able to do less science or we are able to employ less people, and this is an area of work that spans from foot and mouth through to bluetongue virus...to other exotic pathogens which pose a threat to the UK. We are forced to look at this whole area of activity to see where we can juggle the research, so there is a risk.... "

2.Vaccines against FMD are excellent. For pity's sake, let us use them.
Vaccination must be more than "considered" - it must be used as quickly as possible.
As for those regulations that cause exporting farmers (the powerful ones) to raise such a howl of agony if vaccination is suggested, is evident that there are many in the EU hierarchy itself who are not in agreement with the three month/six month rule.
The Member States should challenge these daft regulations - particularly now that Bluetongue vaccination is being embraced by one and all. Regulations are not set in stone. In the 2003 Directive, even the EU Directive - in its very first paragraph - says:

".....the Community is also a Community of values, and its policies to combat animal diseases must not be based purely on commercial interests but must also take genuine account of ethical principles."

3. The new technologies of rapid on-site RT-PCR diagnosis must be embraced and used.
They have been used to track and eliminate pathogens by the military in the West for nearly a decade. They are now being routinely used on farms in the former Soviet Bloc. What - apart from commercial jealousy - is stopping their use here?

4. A truly independent Advisory Group needs enough clout to oversee and if necessary intervene
There needs to be true accountability

Parliamentary Questions are all very well. They do, if asked with skill, eventually tease out of the reluctant Ministry some degree of truth about the way things were done - but an institutionalised secrecy pervades DEFRA and it seems that many have just given up trying to demand answers.

Yet such damning questions as the number of healthy animals killed - and why - should indeed be examined beyond the closed walls of Westminster. There was so little need for the suffering that went on.
If Pirbright had the sort of State of the Art equipment as that used in the private sector proper testing could have been done before animals were summarily killed. The Emersons, who lost all their free range animals were blackmailed with the emotive suggestion that their one possibly suspect pig (it was not in fact infected) could become a "virus factory". They reluctantly agreed to slaughter. In fact, they had no choice. Had they resisted, the Animal Health Act would have made their refusal a criminal act. How ironic it is that had they been living in former Soviet Bloc countries such as Uzbechistan, a diagnostic machine the size of a toaster could have discovered within 20 minutes if that pig was really infected or not. As it was, they lost their pets, their breeding cows who all had names, their pigs and sheep. All destroyed - and for no reason. It is criminal waste and cruelty.

5. Hindsight should have given us foresight

Eminent people spent a great deal of time and effort in preparing reports and making recommendations after the 2001 misery. In 2007 it was clear that we FAILED to follow the following:

1. Vaccination must form part of future control of a disease outbreak (Anderson)
2. Create a new national volunteer reserve to help in a disease outbreak(Anderson)
3. Devise new role for veterinary "paramedics" to assist vets in outbreaks(Anderson)
4. New training for farmers and vets in spotting rare diseases and bio-security(Anderson and Royal Society of London)
5. New guidance and instructions on slaughter of animals(Anderson)
6. A "senatorial" group to be set up to provide independent advice to the Prime Minister and Cabinet during a crisis.(Anderson)
7. Accountants and procurement experts to be recruited to work in emergency control centres during a crisis. (Anderson)
8. Emergency vaccination to be used as "a major tool of first resort" to prevent a foot and mouth outbreak becoming an epidemic (Royal Society)
9. The aim is to "vaccinate to live" and for animals to enter the food chain in the normal way. (Royal Society)
10. Tests to distinguish between an infected and vaccinated animals "a priority" ( i.e. for individual animals as well as the already validated herd based tests).
11. A new campaign to win over consumers to safe eating of foot and mouth vaccinated meat and milk. (Royal Society)
12. More research for a foot and mouth vaccine which could possibly be used routinely (ie not just for emergency vaccination) within 15 years - this would require international agreement. (Royal Society)
13. A new early warning system to alert the country to potential threat from new exotic diseases. One option is for a New National Centre for Animal Disease Research and Surveillance. (Royal Society)
14. A new national database of every owner of farm animals including pets, zoos, rare breed collections and animal sanctuaries. (Royal Society)
15. An extra £250 million funding for research and development, particularly to find a new diagnostic test to quickly identify diseased farms. (Royal Society)
16. Encourage new vets to join the state veterinary service(Royal Society)
17. The setting up of an independent standing committee to monitor the maintenance of effective planning (Royal Society of Scotland)

So if we do not pick up our pens and write to the Anderson Review, what then? Politics has been allowed to play hell with the lives of those it should protect. Knowing this, we are as much to blame if we do nothing.

It is inconvenient and a real pain - but Edmund Burke was right: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. The email address for the Anderson Review is fmdreview@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk

Gardening

2007-11-10T18:35:00.000+01:00

And so we wave farewell to Dr Debby Reynolds. We wish her well. We wish her a better future. We wish ourselves a better future. But those choosing Chief Veterinary Officers seem to be searching for special skills. The last thing wanted in a CVO, it seems, is the dangerous ability to empathise with animals and people. Such a weakness could jeopardise the "disease control strategy" which, according to the departing Debby, "is the best in the world".
(These really were the valedictory words of the CVO. An inability to engage with reality would appear to be another characteristic much prized.)

In 2001, the late, great Professor Fred Brown O.B.E was scathing of another CVO, Jim Scudamore. He said of the poor man that he would be better off doing a different job; "gardening, for example". Fred was one of the best British scientists ever - a brilliant and kindly searcher and researcher of the old school where what mattered was the truth. One of my best memories of him was while we were going through the obstacle course of security at (the so well named) Portcullis House. We were on our way to talk to David Curry, the Chair of the EFRA committee. While we waited, Professor Brown was telling me how Pirbright had been 'world class' precisely because it had been, in its heyday, a public service laboratory. It existed in order to serve the public through science.
And that pretty well summed up Fred Brown too.

There wasn't much he didn't know about Foot and Mouth, but as he wryly remarked,

"scientists know more and more about less and less while politicians know less and less about bugger all."

The EFRA Committee is that All-Party Select Committee whose job includes overseeing DEFRA. Our hopeful little band thought that if the Chairman heard Fred talking with such competent enthusiasm about the elegant new ARS Tetracore FMD PCR device he could hardly fail to use his influence to get the tests trialled and then adopted for use in the UK. Unfortunately, this did not happen.

That 2001 test could, (as the 2007 machines can do even better and more cheaply,) check whether animals were infected with foot and mouth before clinical signs were apparent. There was no fear of cross contamination because of the self sealing cartridge. Proper RT-PCR testing could be done on the farms themselves and give reliable results within the hour.

Had the EFRA Committee put all its clout behind on-site PCR, virtually none of the bloody and senseless killing that was going on then and has been going on since need have taken place.

Early in the 2001 crisis a question had been put to Sir David King, one of the chief architects of the UK's kill them first, ask afterwards policy:

If this machine is as accurate as Professor Brown told me, he said it is 99 per cent accurate, could it not have saved this huge, vast, expensive cull of mainly healthy animals?

It was the best question of 2001 - but it got the wrong answer.

King's waffling reply can be read here. He failed to understand the complexities of what the US were offering for trial but implied that he, David King, naturally, knew all about these machines. He defined the term "PCR" for the benefit of the assembled company. He implied that Pirbright (and himself) knew best. The suggestion that the ARS Tetracore kit worked better than anything the UK could produce for itself was, he implied, nonsense. And cross contamination most certainly would be a problem.

And after the carnage, Sir David King's contempt continued unabated. The following December, after literally millions of healthy animals had been slaughtered in very nasty circumstances indeed, Britain's Chief Scientific Advisor congratulated himself on a job well done and told the Today Programme "we did attempt to validate Fred Brown's test"

No. Professor King is mistaken. What appeared in the Veterinary Record on 6 October 2001 (and it is interesting that it no longer seems to appear in the Vet Rec archive): as "Evaluation of a portable, 'real-time' PCR machine for FMD diagnosis", by Alex Donaldson and his team, was a fiasco because it tested the body of the machine but with the wrong reagents. Which is rather like testing a motor bike after filling its tank with lemonade. "The reagents used in the assay were recommended by the manufacturer of the instrument" claimed the authors - but they were not recommended by the manufacturer, only by a rival company who didn't know what reagents were needed any more than Pirbright did and were only guessing. The paper said that the machine gave "poor results" and that, as far as David King was concerned, was that.

Had it been properly trialled with the correct reagents - in other words, had the US offer been courteously accepted - the story of FMD in 2001 would be very different.

And in 2007, had such machines been used, with or without vaccination, the grief of these past endless weeks could have been spared too. But, because of the intransigence of David King, Debby Reynolds and the yes men of DEFRA and elsewhere, we had neither.

In anywhere other than DEFRAworld, that virus escape from Pirbright would have heralded a real time exercise in vaccination of such importance that farmers and countrymen would have been united in their gratitude. The wretched virus would have been stopped efficiently in its tracks and, to make assurance doubly sure, portable RT-PCR diagnostic machines, operated by anyone after the most cursory training, would have been able to check the oral and nasal swabs of any nearby herds with very little need for blood to be taken. The whole thing would have been over within days.

Why do we go on banging on about all this? Why can we not just let it go?
There are two reasons. The first is that DEFRA still seems unaware of the importance of this technology - in spite of the UK's contribution to the development of new versions such as the Enigma machine at Porton and the Smiths Detection machine These machine must by now be nearly ready for commercial buyers. Some would say it is precisely for this reason that DEFRA has been waiting; so that the profits will come to the UK. Little hope. Small, efficient, cheap machines from elsewhere are on the way and they will be unstoppable. But it is heartbreaking to know that in the former Soviet Bloc countries, machines as small as toasters are already being used routinely on farms to detect and track pathogens with RT-PCR. In those countries viruses such as FMD and Bluetongue can be detected and stopped before they spread and cause the sort of damage that they wreak in Europe.

The second reason is that in a decent society we should expect accountability in our leaders. Animal Health policy in the UK has very little to do with health and even less to do with concern for animals. It is all about maintaining control. Those who have dragged farmers and animals into an unnecessary nightmare have never been accountable, they have never been sacked, they have never even apologised. On the contrary, most of them have been promoted and covered in honours or at least, as DEFRA might put it, " with plaudits".

It is time they were shown the door, leaving animal health to those who would care about animals and about their health. The blessings of modern veterinary science, the boon of technology and vets worth the name should be in charge.

And all the rest should go on gardening leave.

No one will enter my farm to kill my animals...

2007-11-08T19:31:00.001+01:00

Brave, admirable, doomed words.

"If the veterinary service does not show me in writing whose animals actually have this disease, no one will enter my farm to kill my animals,”

Farmers in Cyprus are tearful, angry and disbelieving of the nightmare into which they have been plunged. Brussels is telling them to kill their animals - they want to know which ones for why should they kill healthy animals? Brussels is telling them to comply with the rules - they want to know why they should. Brussels thinks that compensation will silence the outrage - but one farmer,fighting back tears during the House Agriculture Committee hearing on Monday, said his livestock were like his children:

"They offered me £150 for every adult sheep… and £20 for every lamb [to be culled]. I said to them, ‘I wouldn’t even accept £1,150.
Then we sat down and looked at another price estimate. I told them to get up and leave and not to come back. The next day they returned, and this time they didn’t even bother to talk to me or ask me to sign anything. They just went ahead and executed the animals.."

The Cyprus Mail reports that the head of the Veterinary Services, Charalambos Kakoyiannis, appears to be as appalled as the farmers.

"For better or worse, we are in the EU now. I sympathise with your cries of distress and I know you feel as if their animals are like members of your families".

"For better - for worse"? Trusting Cyprus entered willingly into that marriage of 2004. But after all the optimism of the wedding the EU mask drops to reveal something rather worse than a skull. The farmers have no power to resist. Blood-letting and grief has been forced upon them this week by political expediency, not by foot and mouth disease. Now that modern science has provided us with potent inactivated vaccines; now that technical ingenuity has given us the ability - on-site -to diagnose active virus within minutes rather than hours, there is no excuse for the kill first, ask afterwards policy. For what happened in the killing fields of Surrey there was no veterinary or scientific basis; there is none for what is happening under the autumn sun of Cyprus. Anyone who pretends otherwise is a charlatan. All that is lacking is political will.

Emergency vaccination has been used successfully right across the globe in recent years. It works. There has never been a single reported case in the field of an FMD vaccinated animal spreading disease. And the irony is that emergency vaccination is actually permitted by Brussels. But Brussels rules are in place to protect that talisman of protectionism, the status of being "FMD free without vaccination" - so governments will "consider" it and do nothing.

Fotis Fotiou, the Cypriot Agriculture Minister told the farmers that

"any notion that Brussels deliberately wanted to destroy the Cypriot livestock industry was fantastical."

Difficult to think of a more effective way had it been so.
Farmers in the UK are now looking at the destruction of their industry - not because of animal disease but because of the supposed cure for it:Zones and restrictions imposed on us by the EU and by a Ministry that will go to all lengths to enforce rules that are mad, bad, cruel, ignorant and senseless.

The battle for a humane animal health policy goes way beyond a fuzzy concern for animal welfare. It is a battle about personal control and responsibility being wrested away from us. The justification for the removal of our freedoms is - as always - that it is for our ultimate good. It is the ultimate cynicism of those high on the drug of power. This is a battle worth fighting.

Yet it is almost too painful. To report on the calamity unfolding in Cyprus and reading the words of the farmers bring back with such grim clarity the sense of desperation and trauma that the killing policy has brought to us in the past decade. It is a recurring nightmare. We feel physically sick. We want to turn away. We want to drown it out, forget it and stop all this. And that is precisely why we must go on.

(Painting by FMD Vaccination campaigner, John English - now sadly no longer with us. He was always much admired in the Forest of Dean for his love of pigs and cattle and his ability to catch a moment. The painting is a legend. It was with great sadness we heard of his recent and sudden death.)

"It seems that we are obliged to kill ..."

2007-11-06T20:40:00.001+01:00

Poor Cyprus. It has only been a member of the EU since 2004. They are now suffering their first foot and mouth outbreak since 1964 and many there must be aghast to see how membership of the EU brings with it all the miseries that farmers in the UK have suffered - stringent movement restrictions , surveillance, "biosecurity measures" and, worst of all, the forced killing of their farm animals. Hardly surprising that a crowd of angry farmers on Sunday blocked entry to the two farms where officials wanted to kill the animals. It was useless. The cull went ahead yesterday.

The Cypriot Agriculture Minister, Fotis Fotiou, showed in a radio statement his shock at the measures insisted upon by the EU:

"It seems that we are obliged to kill livestock from the three remaining farms as well, which represents around 1,500 animals. Nobody can rule out the culling of many more animals if other test results come back from London indicating the disease has spread."

After the false reassurances of an earlier all-clear at the end of October, the UK has now declared that the latest samples are positive for serotype O of the virus - and all the miserable clanking machinery of the EU has moved into place; the Union has banned all exports of fresh meat, live animals and milk products from the country; the Cypriot authorities have already killed all the sheep in the affected flocks; a 3km protection zone and 10km surveillance zone have been set up around the holding - and thousands more animals are in the firing line, just as in the UK in 2001 and in this miserable year.

The President of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, has told islanders (see report) that

"this is a sacrifice that must be made if the broader dangers for the stockbreeding industry of the island are to be tackled."

A sacrifice? But this too was the hollow consolation felt by the farmers in Surrey,who thought that their reluctant countenancing of the killing of their own animals would save other farmers from the same misery. The Emersons, when their animals - pigs, sheep and, worst of all, the breeding cows, all named, that they cared for so much - were all killed "on suspicion", consoled themselves that theirs would be the last farm. But at least 33 holdings in Surrey (not merely the 8 "infected premises" as officialdom would have people believe) suffered the same fate. Without even having on-farm tests to prove the presence of disease, all the Emerson's free range animals - even the two pet goats - were killed. It took hours to kill the pigs and the cows. It continued well into the night under arc lamps. Not one of the animals was subsequently found to have been infected with Foot and Mouth.
I challenge anyone to listen to the BBC's On Your Farm and fail to be moved by the courage, dignity and unsentimental sadness of this couple.

The right and honourable method of dealing with this disease is to use the blessing of modern virology: vaccination. But, for reasons one can only guess at, the UK would not use the on-site tests that could have saved the animals on all those premises that were summarily condemned by being designated "dangerous contacts" and "slaughtered on suspicion". It is despicable. The Emersons are too much affected by the death of the animals they had cared for to continue to keep breeding cows. And in spite of her stoicism, going into their eerily deserted pig barn with the interviewer proved too much for Mrs Emerson. The UK policy depends on the kindly decency of such farmers - and it lets them down.

And now we see the same misery descending on Cyprus.

What heartbreaking nonsense this all is. Foot and Mouth is not a terrifying killer. It is a disease where symptoms can be of varying degrees of severity. In Surrey they were so mild that many animals had recovered before being detected as having had the disease - but that recovery did not prevent the authorities from killing not only those animals but literally hundreds of others nearby. Yet in the EU and also in the US the downright lie persists that there are no vaccines that can provide an alternative to such indiscriminate killing.

Modern potent vaccines can be used to protect a nation's livestock. Instead, by making vaccination the poor relation in disease control, the EU continues to treat FMD as if it were an invincible terror necessitating the most draconian measures. While officials "stamp out" the disease they also stamp on the feelings and rights of the farmers and kick asunder all the ethics of humane, science- based veterinary care.

When the desperate idiocy of all this is finally put right and people look back on it all they will hardly be able to believe that we were capable of such callousness. As Alan Bennett says of the 2001 mass culling (Untold Stories p293):

"In fifty years' time I am sure that we will not handle animals the way we do now and to succeeding generations our behaviour will seem as barbarous as bear baiting...."

Scotland the brave

2007-11-03T18:44:00.000+01:00

The virus-carrying midges of Northern Europe, deterred and terrified by brave words from the Scots farming union bosses, are going to make a U turn at Hadrian's Wall.
Scotland is a country where midges are virtually unknown.

None of this is true, alas, but to hear a spokesman for the Scottish Beef Cattle Association, evidently appalled that his English counterpart advocates a survival package that would bring Scotland into the Surveillance zone, you would think that it was. He says,

"The SBCA could not be party to a policy which could expose the Scottish livestock industry to this most dreadful disease."

The National Beef Association, the British Pedigree Beef Society's Group, the Livestock Auctioneers Association, and British Camelids are trying to do something to defend their members and protect the animals. They have all asked the Chief Vets of England, Scotland and Wales - in a bid to rescue their members from the consequences of the DEFRA restrictions -

to extend the protection zone to cover the whole of Great Britain - or at least
to allow the movement of pre-tested pedigree stock from a protection zone to a free zone,
and to make sure that the use of an inactivated BTV vaccine does not result in trade barriers being erected against vaccinated stock.

(Actually this is likely to happen the other way round, Vaccinated stock will be at a premium. In Spain a vaccinated calf makes on average 100 EUROS more on the market than an unvaccinated calf.)

NBA director, Kim Haywood says of the four organisations:

"They want to see a compulsory vaccination programme for GB and full government backing for a European Community vaccination policy that covers all Member States."

A compulsory scheme would, of course, be ideal. All the same, even - best case scenario - with Intervet and Merial pulling out all the stops following firm committed orders, no one knows how far vaccine supplies are going to be able to stretch and it is still of vital importance that all the affected governments work together to ensure that vaccine policies are in line with EU requirements. We want to make sure that the pot of funding available from EU taxpayers can be shared by all who need it. Scotland is not included in DEFRA's tendering for vaccine supplies (nor is Wales) and one hopes that they will not assume invulnerability to the point that they fail to make quick and urgent orders for vaccine.

Dan Buglass in today's Scotsman writes,

"Scotland is perceived to be less at risk because of its cooler climate and more northerly latitude..."

"Perceived to be at less risk by whom?" one wonders wearily. Do they really not remember that the rest of the UK was saying that a little while ago too. Indeed, Debby Reynolds said much the same thing on the Today Programme on the 19 Aug 2006. When the Dutch authorities had identified the presence of the blue tongue virus in the Netherlands, our CVO said that although it was "a significant development" the risk to British sheep was "low overall".

For Scotland to stand similarly aloof, assuming that this is a disease that can only affect them if infected animals come into Scotland from elsewhere, is bravado on a par with that of King Canute.

Their brains are in their pockets

2007-11-02T12:12:00.000+01:00

With the news that England (alone) is at least "tendering" for Bluetongue vaccine, we can see that the stable door is at least being approached. But those who would lock it are doing so in blindfolds and the horse is a speck on the horizon.

As always, the notion of actually using vaccination - the one method that works - seems to be simply too much for DEFRA to cope with. It has not ordered any vaccine. It has put out tentative feelers to both Merial and Intervet to ask how much money they want for their vaccines. How can the vaccine companies possibly give an answer if they don't know how much is going to be ordered across the EU? And how - we ask it through a megaphone - can DEFRA continue to keep Merial from its vital work at Pirbright when DEFRA's own appointed expert,Professor Spratt, says it has always been perfectly safe to work with Bluetongue virus there? Is Merial having to send its vital supplies away to France? This seems utterly absurd when every minute counts.

Inter-governmental sharing of information is not happening. DEFRA clearly does not know what other governments are doing in the matter of vaccine. Not surprising then that the Opposition is talking about Britain being "at the end of the queue"

But what queue? Why a queue? There is a lot of money available from the EU to cover costs. It is there to be applied for. Why all this talk of farmers paying? All governments affected by Bluetongue ought to be conferring and acting together - they ought to have done it months and months ago - to ensure that the vaccine companies were primed and ready to supply as much vaccine as needed for all. Without vaccine - for once all agree with this - there really is no hope of getting rid of the BTv-8 strain of virus.

"With every passing day, this map looks more like the opening credits of Dad’s Army..." said the NFUS. Even now, as the midges become more and more infected, European cooperation would help, would it not? Are governments talking to each other or not? It would seem not - since they are not acting in unison.

www.land-care.org.uk comments today:

"It would appear that the EC, who controls the use of vaccines throughout the EU, has been wasting endless time arguing about trade matters, rather than trying to get to grips with the disease itself. Why were our UK representatives at Brussels not insisting on a logical vaccination programme that could be delivered at a time when it would be most effective?"

It will have occurred to many others apart from ourselves and Land Care to wonder what the European Union is for if not to help Member States act in unison at such a time of crisis. The EU Commission had promised to pay 100% costs of vaccine and half the administration costs if a proper and coherent plan could be demonstrated. But practical help and expert advice cannot be expected from them. Member States are on their own. The onus therefore is on Member States to apply for this compensation and to comply with all that the EU demands.

Supporters of the EU claim that all this centralisation exists to facilitate issues of common advantage. The EU involves itself in everything from foreign policy to immigration. It has created a mountain of laws and a monstrosity of regulation. Why - with its huge budgets and expertise - can't it help its apparently hapless member states to formulate a policy - to get them talking and sharing information? What on earth is it really for?

Government spokesmen will sniffily assert that they are always acting in partnership "with industry". The truth is though that DEFRA tends to keep all its little consultation groups separate. Neither effective communication nor true consultation can really be said to be happening. DEFRA, like the EU itself, is now asking its "core stakeholders" to sort out its own response to Bluetongue.
It was Ruth Watkins who, as a working farmer herself but also a virologist, concerned at the piecemeal nature of the vaccination policy that seems to be envisaged, said this morning:

"...People will move unvaccinated (and possibly unknown to them infectious) animals out of the zone if they possibly can, illegally or legal movements or bust.. I shall be sorry if the unions let this happen. They are not guardians of the livestock industry but defenders of the interests of a few rich farmers.
Their brains are in their pockets..."

The vast majority of farmers are given no say at all over their own livelihoods. Real understanding of the disease and what should be being done seems as elusive as ever. Responsibility has been dumped onto farmers who are as in the dark as anyone else and now depending on the "core stakeholders" to know best. And it is the farmers, it seems, who must - in all senses of the word - pay the price.

"Culling" is far too cosy a word to describe what goes on.

2007-11-01T08:59:00.000+01:00

It is a measure of how docile the public will be if glaring facts are kept quietly away from them with the collusion of the media. The whole country should be up in arms at the utter idiocy of the situation. But DEFRA continues to pursue its crazy path and its edicts are obeyed as if it were acting in the public interest.

It is Orwellian.

"Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

Well, if the decisions were made by the virologists, by the vets, by the farmers and by the decent people all over the country we would have a policy that protects instead of one that kills.
Animal Farm's Squealer can turn black into white, day into night, suffering farmers can be turned into hypocritical whingers, and a Department incompetent to the point of gibbering lunacy can somehow still be taken seriously. And now farmers are to help pay for the policies that are forcing them out of business and causing them such grief. But they will be as helpless as ever. They will not share in the decision-making. That is for the "core stakeholders", some of whose trotters, one suspects, are cosy warm.

"We should use the word killing not the euphemism..." The farmer and vet Carl Boyde, in yesterday's BBC report from the killing fields of Surrey, said that "culling" is far too soft a word to describe what goes on.
It was one small step towards giving the public a glimpse of the the sheer misery of the situation in Surrey when DEFRA's FMD policy wrought its havoc.

Carl Boyde:

"We should be looking at the whole situation - vaccination - is that not a better way?"

As that kindly farmer/vet reminded us, in 1923, the 2nd Duke of Westminster had a herd of Dairy Shorthorns at his Eaton Hall estate in Cheshire. He sidestepped the draconian killing regulations, successfully nursed the herd back to health and several of the cured animals went on to win prizes at The Royal Show the following summer. But in the 1967 outbreak no such permission was received and the 300-strong Eaton herd of pedigree Dairy Shorthorns dating back to 1880 and containing champions, all were slaughtered.

This is the policy that against all scientific and ethical considerations persists to this day. Foot and Mouth is indeed a Manufactured Plague - as Abigail Woods so cogently explains in her book.

Arguments backed by knowledge of disease, understanding of modern vaccines, availability of state of the art on-farm diagnosis - in short, all pleas for sanity - fall on the defra ears and closed mind of the authorities.

The EU regulations are mad and bad. They are not founded on scientific knowledge. Their proclaimed precautionary principles are nonsense. Far from existing to protect the health and safety of animals and people, they protect the trading profits of the few. The victims are the rest of us - and the many decent farmers who care about their animals.

This BBC clip shows the continuing distress in Egham of the couple whose misery was recorded on warmwell.com on September 21st.
Carl Boyde is their local vet and what he says rings with the authentic tones of one who sees that the Emperor has no clothes:

" If we can buy and eat meat from countries which practise vaccination why on earth shouldn't we do it here with our own animals? It seems to me a great anomoly that even now in 2007 we still have the same mid-Victorian killing policy which has persisted in successive Ministries of Agriculture and persists in DEFRA to this day."

The BBC interviewer obediently trots out the mantra that Defra "have to abide by European law which states that to keep the highest level of international trading status we cannot routinely vaccinate" and the non-sequitor that vaccination "wouldn't protect against all the different strains of foot and mouth."

Give us strength, oh Lord. No one is arguing that it would. Vaccine protects against the strain for which it is designed - and in Surrey that strain was known (hardly surprising but accidents happen especially when government funding and regulatory care is so abysmal) There were, of course, supplies of the exact match vaccine to hand. Nor is anyone arguing at this stage for routine vaccination - although it will undoubtedly come one day.
The escape of virus is one thing. Turning that accident into a national disaster when the application of vaccination could have contained and eradicated the problem within days is utter, staggering insanity.
Until the public at large realise the miserable absurdity of our current policy and raise their voices against it, the big players of the meat industry, with the dead-eyed collusion of DEFRA and the EU protectionism, will continue to stamp out and stamp on people like the Hepplethwaites.

The horrors and terror and waste of 2001 cost the country £8 billion. The costs this time are still being calculated. Meanwhile, Rob Lawrence, the Hepplethwaites and all those others like them in Surrey, mourn the untimely deaths of their animals, the lonely fields, the changed landscape. They contemplate the future with bewilderment and grief. We contemplate it with anger and a determination that things can will and must change.

We have to write

2007-10-30T18:48:00.000+01:00

Dr Iain Anderson is once again going to chair a review of the Government's reaction to the 2007 Foot and Mouth Disease Outbreak. He has been asked to review lessons drawn from the 2001 outbreak and identify any others arising from the current outbreak. Comments have to be received by 16th November. See also www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk

The decision not to use emergency vaccination was astonishing. The handling by DEFRA illustrates the woeful lack of understanding within the Department of viral disease. All the conditions for immediate success had been met.
We knew the source.
We knew the strain.
We had the laboratory within arms length
and we knew the timescale.
The virus could have been stopped in its tracks within days by ring vaccination from the outside in.

2000 animals in Surrey would not have had to be slaughtered and nor would the obscenely termed "welfare culls" of half a million healthy hill lambs have been needed.

It seems highly likely that the EU would have been sympathetic to such emergency action and would have looked with favour on regionalisation of the immediate area so that the absurd situation of a general country-wide shut down need never have arisen. It could well have led to the outdated regulations receiving critical re-evaluation.

Because rapid on-site testing was not done except for antibodies, only a handful of the 2000 animals killed turned out to have been infected.

If people do not make these points there will be no barriers at all against yet another anodyne report being written and self-congratulation all round.
More at warmwell.com,

Lies, Science and the death of Bees

2007-10-29T14:31:00.000+01:00

When he was at its helm, that eminent expert in bird behaviour, Sir John Krebs, and the FSA itself, were selected winners of the prestigious "Pants on Fire" award by the Norfolk Genetic Information network - for

'their complete failure to live up to their billing as a "force for change" in consumer protection'

The Food Standards Agency has now ordered a review into its advice that

"the current scientific evidence does not show that organic food is any safer or more nutritious than conventionally produced food."

Sir John was well known to be an advocate of GM foods before his surprise appointment to the FSA, dismissing anyone who disagreed as "shrill, often ill-informed and dogma-driven". He was also a member of that inner circle of scientists from the Dark Side, King, Anderson, May, Woolhouse, Ferguson and co. who between them perpetrated and then defended the horrors of the 2001 contiguous cull. Sir David King has recently expressed concern that the public is not always on board with the best scientific advice:

"If we have a breakthrough, and society is not accepting of that, then we have a problem..."

How cynical some of us have become to be less than impressed with his new code of "seven principles aimed at building trust between scientists and society." But it is not words that build trust. And how devalued has that phrase "best scientific advice" become too. It has been wielded in order to bludgeon into silence the perhaps "unscientific" but nevertheless gut level wisdom of the grass roots.

So the FSA is going to look again at last at the best scientific advice that has kept them contemptuous of organic farming for nearly a decade. As if to support such a move, we read today that an ongoing four year Newcastle University study has found that

"Fruit and vegetables contain up to 40 per cent more nutrients if they are grown without chemical fertilisers and pesticides, organic milk contains 80 per cent more antioxidants and organic produce also had higher levels of iron and zinc, vital nutrients lacking in many people's diets."

Did we really need a £12 million project to tell us that? People do not need to be scientists to have an instinctive grasp of what is good.

So Geoffrey Lean's article in the Independent today came as a nasty shock. It revealed that the government has been using taxpayers' "tens of millions of pounds a year to boost research into modified crops and foods" Constant claims of impartiality on GM technology and repeated promises to promote environmentally friendly, "sustainable" farming are, quite simply, lies. Internal documents obtained by the Independent under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that DEFRA (which will not allow farmers to vaccinate their animals against foot and mouth even though the vaccines are safe and effective) have allowed the biotech giant BASF to plant 450,000 modified potatoes in British fields. DEFRA officials ..

"..repeatedly went to remarkable lengths to make sure the trial conditions, supposed to protect the environment and farmers, were "agreeable" to BASF"

How ironic that the Times today asks who will regulate the regulators.

".. “Health and Safety” seems now to be the universal excuse to ban anything that was once enjoyable: bonfires on Guy Fawkes night, conkers contests, diving boards in public swimming baths, festive lights, amateur dramatics – and scores of other traditions embedded in the fabric of life..."

But the nanny state does not stretch its neck into the dark alleys of the biotech industry. The Health and Safety police are not shining their flashlights onto the fact that stringent tests are not required for 'biopesticides' produced continuously in open fields; nor for the herbicides and herbicide residues accumulated by herbicide-tolerant GM crops. "The two traits, biopesticides and herbicide tolerance now account for practically all GM crops grown in the world today,"says www.i-sis.org.uk

Those who have a deep seated worry about the way genes are manipulated by the biotech companies are often derided. And indeed as an advocate of vaccine production involving some degree of genetic engineering I can hardly want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But this is not an all or nothing issue. Nothing need stop me from being glad that human insulin can be grown in GM yeast. The baby can be kept happily in the tub and still the question of the possible biotech monopoly of the food chain be raised with deep misgivings.

A fierce GM debate is raging in Europe. In France, where 80 percent of the public are against GMO foods, President Sarkozy has said no more will be grown until an evaluation has been considered. When one type of GM maize was fed to rats in a laboratory study at the University of Caen, their immune system was weakened, a finding that echoes the study done 10 years ago by Dr Arpad Putzai whose research at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen found that rats developed stomach lesions after eating GM potatoes.

He was vilified. Being a heretic of today's scientific authodoxy is not much healthier than it was in the days of Galileo.

Hungary banned the planting of Monsanto's MON 810 seed in January 2005. Germany says maize grown from MON 810 seeds can only be sold if there is an accompanying monitoring plan to research its effects on the environment. Austria could soon be facing an attempt by EU regulators to force it to lift bans on two GMO maize types. See www.dw-world.de

Plans for full commercial go ahead in the UK are not far away. Farmers will be allowed to plant GM oilseed rape just 35 metres from non-GM crops, forage maize will be able to be planted 80 metres away and grain maize will be allowed within 110 metres of conventional crops. Pollen can be carried by insects or wind for miles (a pine tree's pollen has been shown to spread 400 miles away.)
In Canada, the introduction of GM oilseed rape has all but wiped out the organic oilseed rape industry by cross contamination.

And what of the bees? The so called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)could well be laid at the door of the biotechnicians. It has been seriously suggested that bees are disappearing because of exposure to the unnaturally large quantities of the naturally occurring pesticide Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) which is produced in GM crops. In the GM plant Bt is produced by every cell including roots, stems, leaves and flowers - and the pollen.
It is not clear if the quantities of Bt produced by GM crops are themselves to blame for bee deaths. We know that the parasitic varroa mite that carries the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, has put paid to many millions of bees. However, what is clear is that organic farmers such as those at Sheepdrove go out of their way to nurture plants that redress the balance and help the bees.

Albert Einstein said,

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

On the issue of GMOs the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is defiant. It says its funding for the research on GM crops would continue even if there was "a Europe-wide ban" on growing them commercially. (It may be remembered that the BBSRC, which also owns the land and buildings on the Pirbright site, was not so keen to shell out for some drain repairs. As Jonathan Shaw told the House of Commons this month, funding of the effluent drainage system, "whether remedial or replacement" was their business as much as IAH's or Merial's.)

Tony Blair put Labour Party donor, Lord Sainsbury, on the government's GMO regulatory committee - a clear case of clash of interests. Labour's legislation covering GMO trials has been risible and no one bothers to deny any more that Governments and big business work hand in hand. And where does that leave small business? The UK government seems to be facing up to the end of traditional farming with an extraordinary stoicism. It is hard not to speculate on the reasons why.
Monsanto and its rival giants maintain that biotech foods are the only solution to global hunger. And acting on the best scientific advice no doubt, our government wants a cut of the huge profits to be made in the course of carrying out this altruistic aim.

There is a truth here that is so obvious it somehow never gets mentioned

He who controls the food has control of the people

What a heady thought to those high on power already.

urgency

2007-10-26T20:28:00.000+02:00

Time is ticking away. And we feel like passengers on a rapidly sinking ship who are not being given access to the lifeboats we can see lined up on the davits because there has not yet been an official drill.
The UK has NOT put in any order for Bluetongue BTv-8 vaccine because, say DEFRA, it isn't yet available.

Well it won't be if they don't order it.

Is somebody with a bit of clout yet understanding all this and realising the lunacy of inaction and demanding that urgent decisions be made? Well, it is just possible that there are some within the Opposition parties who are on the case at last. We watch and hope.

We can only hope too that someone at Page Street was listening to Intervet's Paul van Aarle on Farming Today this morning.

"It's not a matter of difficulty. We have good production capacity and can handle quantities (if they are certain). The main issue there is when we get the commitment from the government..."

Merial, of course, were further on in production even than Intervet - but when DEFRA banned further work on the vaccine in Surrey everything ground to a halt. Merial's vaccine now has to be produced in France.

We hear from an organic sheep farmer in Germany that the third company, Fort Dodge, is also developing an inactivated BTv-8 vaccine in Spain. He was told:

"We are aware, that there is an urgent need for vaccine and we would be happy for you if we already had one. We can only succeed in producing the necessary amount of doses by working together,"

Working together does seem the only possible way for Europe to emerge from this and it looks as though the vaccine companies are prepared to work in collaboration to prepare adequate doses of vaccine in the face of a threat that involves us all.

Are the European countries able to get together too? It is vital to ensure that a coherent plan is drawn up Europe wide. The affected organisations in the UK are now strongly urging the UK government to take the necessary steps - and how bizarre that things are moving so desperately slowly. But Kim Haywood, NBA director, made a very pertinent observation:

"There are suggestions that government is uneasy about approving a vaccination
programme because it has never done so with FMD.."

All too likely. What a terrible irony it is that foot and mouth, for which there have been modern marker vaccines available which have proved their worth since long before 2001, is still being "cured" with the unrepentant UK's blunt instrument of mass slaughter - yet it is Bluetongue , which does not yield to anything except eradication via vaccines, that is causing the UK finally to examine its mediaeval mindset. All the same, the process is tortuous and it is moving at the pace of a reluctant snail.

Ms Haywood, also at Brussels last week, is under no illusions about the necessity of putting in vaccine orders at once.

"..without it the UK's farmers will find it impossible to protect both their livelihoods and their stock."

As for the Zones with which parts of the country are now swathed and strangled, is DEFRA, in a misplaced determination to control the virus, actually killing farming itself? Should the whole of the British Isles bite the bullet and accept that the disease is well and truly with us?

It seems to be being assumed in the UK that Bluetongue spread faster in Holland and Belgium, where they extended the control zone to the entire country, than it did in France, where control zones were adhered to for as long as possible. But with the wildfire spread of BTv in Europe - and the fact that the infected midges have been around in the UK certainly since early August - it would seem very unlikely indeed that the control zones are not going to have to spread out wider and wider in the next weeks and months. It's the next days though that are of vital importance to those who are stuck. Those such as Frank Langrish, chairman of the British Wool Marketing Board, who think that unless the zone is extended to the whole of the country, "we in the CZ are all finished"

He says

"...I have spoken to people in Holland and Belgium about it. They all said it’s just a waste of time trying to control it. You just accept you have got it and if we are confident we are going to have a vaccine by next summer, we can live with it until then. The disease is not going to kill animals but the restrictions are going to kill thousands unless we move to one CZ."

It is a very persuasive view. All the same, there are those in the Welsh Assembly for instance who are not at all keen voluntarily to share the restrictions even if their extension would alleviate much of the problem. The NFUS' Nigel Miller too says:

"Scotland has no intention of becoming part of a UK-wide Bluetongue Control Zone, unless the disease situation changes significantly..."

Perhaps Mr Miller is unaware of just how close BTV is to Scotland now; since it has been discovered in Denmark, Poland and Scandinavia it is certainly now winging its way inexorably nearer.

German Bluetongue expert, Sabine Zentis, remains deeply sympathetic but adamant in her advice:
"... they really shouldn't extend the zone but rather give permission for all movements directly to slaughter. .. once the vector activity ceases, animals for breeding can be moved after blood tests giving a negative result for the virus. We have been living with these restrictions for 14 months now - and they are not as bad as watching animals go down with BT in large numbers..."

True. But watching healthy animals go down in large numbers because there is no other humane course - seeing them slaughtered, wasted and burned or buried because movement is impossible - this is also a black misery that seems out of all proportion to the disease itself. We really need to know whether the livestock controls are actually playing any useful part at all in preventing spread of the disease.

DEFRA's Disastrous Dithering

2007-10-25T09:43:00.000+02:00

Merial and Intervet say that, between them, they could meet demand in 2008, provided there is a plan. If there is no coherent plan, they will have to produce vaccine based on 'first come - first served' basis, which is most certainly not the best strategy for the EU. Merial indicates they will not raise vaccine prices in case of shortages

"Don't let people confuse you," we are told by the insider who told us the above, "It is just a matter of political will".

If the EU Commission is short of funds, they should go to the European Parliament and ask for more.(Jan Mulder is a member of the budget committee. He spoke kindly to me in Brussels after the four hour session in the Parliament.)

The key points we have to get the politicians to understand are these:

The Commission promised to pay for the vaccines themselves
The Commission promised to pay 50% of the vaccination costs during the first year.

Our European neighbours are much further up the learning curve. Michel Barnier, the excellent French Minister of Agriculture, has put in an order for 33.4 million doses of vaccine. Germany plans to order 5 million doses and says "eradication of BT can only be achieved by vaccination of all susceptible farmed ruminants..."

Holland is ordering 1 or 2 million vaccine doses for sheep while the decision will be taken on the 6th of November for cattle.

Both Merial and Intervet have prototypes of vaccines available. They need only firm orders in order to get producing. After production, they need time for safety testing of vaccines. It should be possible to produce vaccines by May 2008.

DEFRA is at the very bottom of this steep learning curve and is dithering.

This, says an observer at the meeting in the Hague in early October, was very apparent. Any suggestion that DEFRA was told by vaccine companies that it was then too late for an order to be delivered in the spring is not the case. It is simply a matter of political will.

Heartbreakingly, neither DEFRA nor even the British MEPs are up to speed. Precious time is being frittered away while defeatist nonsense is being spread about on the subject of bluetongue vaccine. Talk of a mere 'firefighting' amount or that vaccines will be terribly expensive "due to demand" or that since the EU is offering support out of a "very limited pot" - all this is DEFRA defeatism and bewilderment and is leading to no action at all. In short, an excuse for a headless chicken to run about in circles.

Dr Ruth Watkins - who most certainly is up to speed - gave a talk yesterday to the Pedigree Beef Society Group at an emergency Bluetongue meeting at Stoneleigh.

The Powerpoint presentation that she gave as an illustration to her talk really is a crash course in 'all you need to know about Bluetongue'. She concludes that inactivated vaccine is absolutely vital for us and a firm order must be made - now.

(FOOTNOTE We hear this morning from a reliable source that DEFRA may, after all, be ordering vaccine "or will do shortly". One wonders, as always, at the entrenched mindset where everything must be kept secret. Paranoia reigns - usually a symptom of a deeper illness. But if this is true - if - then at least we can stop banging on about ordering vaccine.)

The Midges arrived, safe and well, on August 4th

2007-10-24T19:10:00.000+02:00

Informed voices are starting to be raised in earnest about the desperate Bluetongue situation.

(The culicoides wing looks like this, actually)

The increasingly vocal European Livestock Alliance has put forward a Resolution to which governments other than my own are most certainly listening:

"the disease situation does not allow further inaction... European Governments must act swiftly and decisively in order to ensure large scale vaccine production as soon as possible ...Governments, European Commission/ European Parliament, and the various stakeholder groups" should "immediately develop Plans of Action regarding the species to be vaccinated, vaccination schedules, required vaccination coverage and allocation of available vaccine stocks within Europe as soon as they become available."

One of the leading lights of the ELA is that most experienced and world renowned expert in fighting animal disease, Paul Sutmoller. An opinion on BTV biosecurity sent to Dr. Sutmoller by fellow scientist Geoff Letchworth, DVM, Ph.D, makes very clear that the present stymying of BTV vaccine production by DEFRA is potentially catastrophic.

Professor Letchworth wrote:

"The unfortunate situation of one of the world's preeminent vaccine companies being precluded from producing a bluetongue vaccine to protect animals against an ongoing epidemic prompts me to weigh in on the subject of bluetongue biosafety."

He says that the virus is not going to be killed by an English or even the most extreme Arctic winter. It is here to stay.

Yet DEFRA is still expressing worries about the possible escape of a virus that cannot infect animals unless actually injected. Prof Letchworth is tactful but adamant:

"...worries about rigorous biocontainment requirements would be counterproductive if they delayed or prevented the use of vaccine ... the past year's experience has shown that not having a vaccine is a major risk."

(See Prof Letchworth's opinion.)

But how grateful we must be for the knowledge that IAH and the seconded Met Office man can, with such expertise, observe, analyse and chart the movements of the bluetongue virus carrying midge:

"Overnight on 4/5 August was considered ideal in respect of conditions for midge take-off, safe transit and landing."

The culicoides, then, evidently enjoyed a pretty carefree passage to our shores.

The IAH seems not to be aware that their pride in all the data collected "to monitor the likely midge development in the area and help to identify areas for further spread of disease in the area..." is of precious little help to the livestock farmers in the straitjacket of DEFRA restrictions. They are caught far more tightly than any midges could have been in DEFRA's inspired but non-existent sticky nets.

Can it really be possible, as it is most certainly rumoured to be, that DEFRA believes it can do without vaccine? That under the banner of the egregious Fred Landeg, the Battle of Britain against the Midge can be won without weapons? Vaccination languishes impotently at the Merial site at Pirbright - so now nothing is left except the lives and livelihoods of those on the front line.

And now for another food scare, courtesy of the Food Standards Agency

Just when sheep farmers felt that there could be nothing left to hurl at them, the Food Standards Agency has chosen to create another lamb scare. The BBC article and that of the Telegraph this morning create more confusion than they clear up.

In the past, idiotic warnings about the risks from eating lamb have caused problem after problem for producers but we really thought the nuisance must cease once Ben Bradshaw finally and quietly at the end of January admitted,

"the prevalence of BSE in the UK sheep population is most likely zero."

But no. Today we read news that will have people avoiding lamb like the proverbial plague. Any mention of babies will do it and, sure enough, this latest "food alert" is that humans and babies could be at risk if they eat lamb.

An abattoir "vet" apparently thought he could possibly smell sheep dip on one carcase - but even then there had not been enough time for any drug to have passed into the meat. What will certainly not register as warnings fly from shopper to shopper is the fact that the relevant drug (that never had time to reach the meat) has never been shown to cause harm to humans, the risk of contamination is negligible and that any meat that could even possibly have been suspect was removed on Friday.

Cynical onlookers may well be watching with satisfaction. See warmwell.com

POSTSCRIPT I have been taken to task - quite possibly correctly - over this last paragraph. Chris writes, "Credit to the vigilant officers I say - the public deserve protection from these chemicals; the villains of the piece are the abattoir buyers; this may have been a careless oversight, although I doubt it.
Needless to say, the timing is dreadful!"

However, another update via email is even more interesting: "I heard this week (before this story broke) that a lorry load of sheep for slaughter had been impounded at an abattoir in the North, due to 'taint' . This turned out to be the use of strong anti - midge disinfectant, sprayed all over the lorry in accordance with Defra guidelines - of course - before it could travel with slaughter stock to an abattoir outside the bluetongue zones. The smell had been picked up in their fleece from the lorry.
Don't know if this could be the basis for this bit of mischief as well?"

A weakness in the system

2007-10-24T18:01:00.000+02:00

Hilary Benn has chosen this precise moment to tell the EFRA Select Committee that that there are swingeing cuts to be made in animal health...
So in spite of the looming death of livestock farming, the threat of bluetongue, foot and mouth, TB, and a host of other zoonoses on the move towards us, some of which could affect or even kill humans, animal health doesn't really matter.

"I am keen to make progress on savings in animal health..."

As for the escape of virus - it was just a

"weakness in the system"

Yes. One could say that.

Aghast to hear that animal health doesn't really matter would have been those gathered in Washington for the OIE conference They are, dare we say, more influential than Mr Benn, and not only know the opposite to be true but are saying so loud and clear:

"Healthy animals are crucial for the future of human race"

said Dr. David Nabarro, United Nation System Influenza Coordinator

"emerging animal diseases, three quarters of which are zoonotic, are set to become more and more part of the world landscape...the international community will be required to take an increasingly active long-term role in a global system of animal disease prevention and control."

said Dr. François Le Gall of the World Bank.

"only one country which does not comply may endanger the entire planet"

said Bernard Vallat, Director General of OIE,

The OIE conference brought together the eminent voices of specialists of both animal and public health, World Bank economists and experts in development. All renowned worldwide. They had gathered to discuss ways of dealing with zoonoses in the globalised world - and one of their major conclusions?

The costs of preventing major animal diseases are significantly less than those associated with outbreaks

Hilary Benn is widely acknowledged to be a nice man. He is nice, gentle and earnest, his father is liked and admired even by former enemies - and Hilary himself is a good man and, whisper it quietly, a vegetarian. What rotten luck to be handed the poisoned chalice of DEFRA just in time for the floods, pestilence and plagues to arrive.
But he is the wrong man, pursuing the wrong policies in the wrong government. We are seeing some wretched decisions being made.

Can the government really be watching the demise of farming with complacency and even satisfaction? Can those who talk blithely of the need to get rid of farmers really not know that the end of traditional livestock farming means the end of UK self sufficiency, the end of the much loved rural landscape, the end for many dependent wildlife species who need livestock farming and the end of unique skills and family traditions that will change for ever the heart and face of Britain?

The crisis in farming, particularly in the hilly areas of England, Wales and Scotland, is of enormous importance to Britain as a whole. It can never be put into reverse once it reaches a critical point. The fact that the opposition parties appear ignorant of these vital matters too is yet another indication of the depths to which the parliamentary system has sunk - a 'weakness in the system' that threatens even greater danger to us all than the escape of virus that could, with vaccination, have been contained and remedied within days.

This could finish us

2007-10-22T23:13:00.001+02:00

The BTV-8 strain of Bluetongue has been a problem in Northern Europe for over two years but the EU, for all its macho, centralised strength and influence, will not in this instance take control. Instead, the big boss leans back in his swivel chair and says to his now impotent underlings, "It is up to you. Decide what to do. Get on with it."

But the UK is dithering.

The virus, carried by thousands upon thousands of adult female midges must be zapped fast. If BTV-8 vaccine production at Merial is still being held up by an edict from DEFRA then the whole of livestock farming in the UK is at risk and we are in deep trouble. The anti-vaccination mindset at DEFRA is very heavily entrenched. Even if lip service is being paid to the undeniable truth that only vaccination works on Bluetongue - nothing is at present being done. Like the EU itself, the tiny culicoides midges are experts in vast empire building. Their destructive power is not going to be stopped by boundaries - and this power, like the boundaries themselves, is growing all the time.

Germany has realised the urgency of the situation and an emergency meeting has been held so that firm orders for BTV-8 vaccines can be dispatched. Are the Germans getting their towels on the deckchairs first? If so, good for them.
They have understood that actual supplies of vaccine do not magically appear without firm orders. Vaccine producers cannot be expected to work blind without knowing how many million doses are going to be required. They are not funded as a public service - and can get their fingers badly burned. Intervet could not claim compensation a little while ago when CSF vaccines had to be thrown away because the presumed orders never materialised.

The Chief Veterinary Officers of all affected European countries are the ones - whether they realise this or not - who are responsible for giving vaccine companies a firm commitment for vaccine orders. Getting adequate supplies will depend on those adequate firm orders.

The EU seems to be prepared to be generous in funding - but it is down to each member state to order supplies. Contact Debby Reynolds or Fred Landeg to request that a firm commitment for supplies be ordered. Merial at Pirbright is furthest on with this work. It will be catastrophic if DEFRA continues to delay permission when there is in this work, as Professor Spratt pointed out, no danger to man nor beast.

Is farming being left to die because DEFRA and its masters thinks all the meat needed to feed the UK can be imported?

I was told, off the record in Brussels, that the UK would prefer to import all meat and want to be shot of their own farmers. Perhaps it is thought that they cost too much in political embarrassment, subsidies and compensation.

Well, there are a few problems. Such a sanguine view of the future fails to appreciate record-high oil prices and turbulent financial markets. The Financial Times today is warning

"a rise in inflation would trigger global interest rate increases, and this in turn could mark the beginning of a severe global recession"

When warmwell first began to track the price of oil in April 2004 (See oil page) we were amazed by the fact that the price of a barrel was edging towards 50 dollars. Today, bets being taken on its reaching 100 look safe. It had reached 90 dollars on friday.

As for wheat, the notion that wheat will always be available somewhere has been proved wrong. Bad harvests or outlooks in Australia, India, Pakistan, Texas and elsewhere have left countries who depended on reliable supplies scrambling for it. The price has skyrocketed. When other foodstuffs become scarce the politicians who have turned their backs on home-grown food are going to be in trouble. Hungry crowds are not interested in words.

"We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act"

James Lovelock, that gentle, brilliant scientist whose fear for Gaia is more and more justified, has been warning us for some time now:

"our nation is now so urbanised....we are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; ...we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can."

A top Defra adviser recently spoke disparagingly to a farmer about how the UK is now in a

"post agricultural era"

This might well explain the catastrophic ignorance among those directing policy. What they cannot see are the dangers of allowing livestock farming to die a slow death.

Dying a fast death is what a heartbreaking number of lambs on Frank the Wool's farm are pretty certain to face. His "diary of a bluetongue farmer" ought to be being read by everyone. You can read such things at www.fwi.co.uk/Community/forums - but not in the newspapers. Most of them, it seems, are colluding in keeping silent about the death of lambs and of agriculture. The public are not being made aware that hundreds upon hundreds of healthy animals are, yet again, paying the price of ineffective disease controls. The price the farmers are paying is causing them to say, "This could finish us."

Frank the Wool says

" If the government will not order the BTV8 vaccine this week (and pay for it) then we might as well accept that there is little point in trying to continue sheep farming..."

He says, if, as is all too likely, it becomes impossible to sell his sheep on Friday

".... we will be forced to resort to on farm slaughter and burial for the store lambs.I doubt we will be given the luxury of a £15.00 disposal scheme as they have in Scotland and Wales. We will also have to make the hard decision to slaughter the ewe lambs and assess the maximum number of ewes that we have a chance of putting to the Tup. The surplus ewes will also have to be killed."

Most heartbreaking of all, we read now that infected midges have probably long since moved on to bite more animals. All the sheep tested on Frank's farm were negative but his two Rams had been bitten by infected midges. His 19 cattle were extremely healthy but 5 of them were both sero positive and also positive to antibodies. This means, of course, that they were infected some time ago (at least ten days). They are not contagious to other animals but midges can get infected - and move on. Midges should be allowed to bite only vaccinated immune cattle and therefore not get infected!

Next year not only will cattle be infected but also many more sheep as there will be many, many more infected midges.

The UK's present pitiful stable-door-slamming disease controls are killing animals not the virus.

But there is even worse. Disease control depends on farmers. They are the front line defenders because they can spot the first symptoms. If farmers feel they are going to be stuck and stymied and harassed as a result of reporting notifiable disease, going to have to slaughter and waste the animals they have looked after, then they are going to stop reporting disease.

Counting for something

2007-10-20T15:11:00.000+02:00

At the start of our two-day conference, (the combined ELA/EU FMD&CSF Coordination Action meetings held in Brussels on 17th and 18th of October 2007) farmers, vets, stakeholders and scientists, were welcomed to that semi-circle of seats, each with its own headset and microphone that is the Parliament chamber in Brussels.
United in a tentative optimism, we had come together from Holland, Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland and even the USA to listen and to question. In the UK, an unaccountable Ministry that gives the impression that animals count for nothing and that it is farming families who should bear the brunt both of animal diseases and the arbitrary controls to slap them down and stamp them out, is getting increasingly hard to stomach - but the fact that the MEPs had wanted us to come seemed a very promising start. Lily Jacobs of the Agriculture and Rural Development Committee, opened the afternoon's discussions with some statements that seemed promising too:

"animals must be seen as more than mere animal products"

and that

"vaccination should not affect value"

So optimism seemed at last to be justified. However, as some of us were able to say, emergency FMD vaccination (always so frustratingly "considered") is not going to be acceptable to those who resist it while the EU rules continue to penalise it. Insistence that trade is held up for a further three months, together with the complex meat treatments demanded, is simply not underpinned by the science. There were murmurs of support from behind and around when this was said but, to general dismay, grim shakings of the head by several of those facing us could be seen. The extra three month ban was defended in terms that made no sense at all to the scientists among us.

There are, it seems, persistent carriers of the dogma that FMD infection, stamped out at any cost in blood and unhappiness, is better than FMD elimination by the safe, potent, modern vaccines that can so successfully distinguish diseased from vaccinated animals.

It was a blow - the more so since it doesn't seem credible that this can be anything more than a thin disguise for protectionism. But the harm it causes to farm animals, farming families and to farming itself is incalculable and, as one of the gentle farmers at the conference later told us with such passion, the effects of 2001, let alone this latest misery, are still taking their economic and emotional toll. He said that in 2001, DEFRA had said that lambs had to be starving to qualify for the payments of the welfare cull

"We chose to feed them and ended up almost starving ourselves."

We were cheered by the robust assertion that expecting the farming families to foot the bill when they have no say in policy nor guarantees of efficiency is mere "taxation without representation" and unacceptable. But gloom returned at the news that the "Community Animal Health Policy" document, in its draft form, had actually had many references to "welfare" crossed through by the CVOs themselves. It made some of us very thoughtful.

This is not the place for a detailed report of the rest of the two day meeting. A great deal of ground was covered; there were experts with a refreshing manner and a grasp of their subjects that made listening a pleasure. Topics ranged from the practicalities of vaccine production to the importance of the genetic pool in rare breeds, from the skills on the ground needed in a crisis to the little known habits but boundlessly successful spread of the culicoides midge - and much in between. New friendships were forged, assumptions challenged without rancour, questions raised and answered - and a forum for change in the evolving European Livestock Alliance began to look increasingly possible. The speakers joined together at the front for a final question and answer session, the sun beamed in and everyone expressed warm appreciation towards ELA and the Coordination Action organisers for the hard work that had paid off so handsomely.

Even the disasters were not as bad as they might have been. Two of the most eminent of the party had been stuck in a traffic jam for six hours while the rest of us were in the EU parliament but had safely arrived and were smiling wryly at us on our return to the hotel. British Airways had managed to mislay both Roger Breeze's suitcase and the rapid diagnostic machine that was to have been demonstrated to all. It finally arrived at the Hotel reception area, safe and sound, the day after most delegates had left and very early on the morning of Dr Breeze's own departure. Roused at an ungodly hour to see it in operation after all, I was grateful to the French train strike that meant I too was still at the hotel. I can personally attest that getting a sample into the machine (it looked like a large toaster) is easy and safe. Once inside, the sample is locked irreversibly into its small cassette and can later be disposed of with no danger of cross contamination or leakage. My training took less than five minutes but I could operate such a machine in the field, see the results transmitted by the internet and then dispose of the sealed sample with as much confidence as any enthusiastic young operator in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan.

Why there? Because, although not yet in sophisticated Europe, a paradigm shift in disease control is taking place. Irony of ironies it is happening in the former Soviet bloc countries. Driven by the need to protect the world from the biological warfare threats of former times, countless dollars and expertise are being poured into Eastern Europe. The Cold War development of pathogens and biological warfare is being sent into reverse there with the result that we are going to see diseases eliminated actually within our own lifetimes - many of those very diseases that are at present merely being swatted at by Europe with its regulations, arbitrary controls, agribusiness interests and absurdly centralised control freakery.

This progress from the East is unstoppable. The overall system that uses such machines will soon be in operation everywhere to pinpoint disease and target it efficiently. It isn't going to be stopped by DEFRA disapproval. It isn't going to be stopped by anything. Like the amazing success of Wikipedia, Google and the Internet itself - the opportunity to claim information without its having been channelled or diverted first will give back to ordinary people a large measure of control over their lives. Will we have long to wait before we see such a transformation happening in our own countries? Rather than years I think we can start counting the months. The impertinence of bureaucratic interference can be consigned to its inevitable obscurity. When technology allows to everyone who needs it access to information, democracy is alive and well - and it seems certain that this particular access to information will soon help ensure that our animals remain so too.

Photos: Moira Linaker

More bluetongue

2007-10-17T21:17:00.000+02:00

Reuters reports that new cases of livestock disease bluetongue have been confirmed in Cambridgeshire and Kent, prompting the Defra to expand the area in which it controls animal movements.

"This is obviously unwelcome news for the farming industry, however, given the nature of this disease and its means of spread, this is not entirely unexpected," Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer Fred Landeg said in a statement.

The new cases were near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, and Ashford, Kent. The country's first ever case of bluetongue was reported in Suffolk on September 22.

Landeg confirmed an outbreak of the disease in the country on September 28 after several subsequent cases of the disease which quickly spread from Suffolk to neighbouring county Essex.

Defra said there were 41 confirmed premises affected by bluetongue, as of 4:30 pm on Tuesday. Control Zones have been put in place around these two new cases and the existing Protection Zone has been extended accordingly.

In a separate statement, NFU President Peter Kendall said: "It is obviously deeply disappointing to learn the disease has spread as far west as Peterborough and that the Protection Zone has moved further across the country."

"As an organisation we need to look carefully at the implications of this news, and will be consulting urgently with our members, because it will have a major financial impact on a huge number of livestock farmers, particularly those in the Midlands."

Well, that is certainly one way of putting it!

Scare over

2007-10-16T18:43:00.000+02:00

According to Reuters, the temporary control zone in East Sussex was lifted today after negative laboratory tests for foot and mouth disease. Movement controls had been imposed on Monday after suspect signs of the disease in sheep.

New FMD case in East Sussex?

2007-10-15T14:56:00.000+02:00

The news of yet another 3 kilometre Temporary Zone, this time centred on Beckley and Peasemarsh in East Sussex, could not have come at a crueller time. If the suspected sheep prove to be positive then bang goes the lifting of the restrictions so desperately awaited on Wednesday.

The DEFRA site just baldly points the way to its new Declaration in which, in the inimitable language and tone we have had to expect from DEFRA "keepers of a susceptible animal in the Zone"... "shall take all such steps as are necessary to prevent it from straying from the premises on which it is kept..." Warmwell.com has put a slightly enlarged and clearer map of the new temporary zone here.

The BBC - which seems to get information long before anyone else, says that the:

"3km foot-and-mouth temporary control zone has been put in place around premises in East Sussex. It follows a veterinary assessment of suspected signs of the disease in sheep. Tests are in progress on livestock at the site near Rye.

The government had planned to lift the movement ban in low-risk foot-and-mouth areas on 17 October. The plan also to lift the Surrey foot-and-mouth protection zone was dependent on no further outbreaks."

If this proves to be a positive case will anyone still dare to suggest that the non-vaccination gamble paid off?

And now for some hot air...

DEFRA says methane emissions from dairy cattle should be reduced by 60 per cent within 15 to 20 years while refrigeration of fresh milk should be phased out:

"Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have made a serious proposal that consumers switch to UHT (Ultra-High Temperature or Ultra-Heat Treated) milk to reduce greenhouse gas emissions"

explains Valerie Elliott in The Times this morning.

Michael Greaves, who alerted us to this, comments that it is yet another "example of the Kafkaesque world inhabited by DEFRA". Valerie Elliott quotes Ionwen Lewis, President of the Women's Food and Farming Union: "We are very privileged in this country to be drinking fresh pasteurised milk..." and this is very true.

In France, for example, fresh milk tended only on to be on sale where there were enough British immigrants to make it worthwhile but many of the French are now buying it too. The dairy adviser at the NFU says the DEFRA target could be achieved only by destroying half the national dairy herd. The Chairman of the NFU’s dairy board, Gwyn Jones' comment:

"I believe there are people inside the Government who are trying to destroy our industry. Here we are in the middle of fighting two diseases and this pops up from Defra. You have to wonder what is going on if our own people are plotting against us.."

Conspiracy? Or an insensitivity and incompetence of such breadth and depth that it amounts to the same thing.

More than hot air: One cannot help thinking about the discharges of intestinal gas - somewhat more of a threat to the ozone layer than the cows - produced by the human population of the UK . A mass cull perhaps? The excess population - especially the obese - could be turned into biofuel in a final solution for their welfare. Several of DEFRA's irritating little problems would disappear in one fell swoop.

"a fair number of these tough, resilient men tell me that they have had enough..."

An article today in the Herald warns that hill farmers in Scotland, men well able to withstand one of the harshest environments in Europe, are not going to be able to withstand the ravages of Bluetongue if it become endemic. They are talking about giving up. And, as the article predicts, (and not only in Scotland of course) if hill farming dies out there will be "one of the biggest environmental and demographic disasters yet".

Many will remember the miserable (and tragically unnecessary) Brecon Beacon cull of hefted sheep in 2001. Hefted sheep know their area and their shepherds are highly skilled. When this knowledge goes, it goes for ever. Bluetongue is not going to go. Without a vaccine it will become endemic and the ancient skills of the hill farmers are going to be lost. And BTV-8 vaccine production at Merial is still languishing under the intransigent command of DEFRA.

".....The Dutch and Germans ...must be weeping at the delay"

2007-10-14T21:19:00.000+02:00

"by a malign stroke of fate....work there is now at a halt while the clapped-out buildings are brought up to scratch." So says Clive Aslet on the subject of DEFRA's indefinite and groundless hold-up of Bluetongue vaccine at the Merial plant on the Pirbright site. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph he says that when a vaccine for Bluetongue is finally ready, there is no doubt that it will be used.

"This ought to pave the way for foot and mouth vaccine to be used as a matter of course throughout Europe.

He reminds readers that in those far-off days of August, it appeared that the Brown government had learnt the lessons of 2001. "Vaccination was talked of sympathetically. Since then, Defra has reverted to type" adding that it was the UK who pressed for Europe to be treated as a foot and mouth free zone in the first place and echoes what warmwell has always maintained,

"It is only the financial interest of a small number of livestock farmers - who would, for a time, be prevented from exporting their animals - that prevents vaccines from being used."

It is cheering to find that there are commentators talking about the ethical dimension to so-called welfare culls of animals. ".. For the meat won't be sold in supermarkets (we consumers are said to be too finicky to buy it). It will be incinerated. Won't the Third World goggle at us in appalled disbelief?"

Bluetongue hits goats in Holland

From ProMed update email

"...In a group of more than 100 goats, 10 have been found to be seriously sick. Up to now, it was not known if goats, infected with BTV-8, would develop a clinical disease.."

The UK would do well to learn from our European neighbours.

We have, also in the Sunday Telegraph, the misleading headline "Bluetongue spreads from cattle to sheep" which suggests that cattle can pass the disease on to sheep. The article fails to explain clearly enough that the only vector is the midge. Bluetongue is not contagious and it is worrying that there are still journalists writing about animal disease in the UK who appear not understand much about it and who are in danger of misleading the public. Sheep can be infected only if an infected female midge feeds on it while in the viraemic stage. They cannot be infected by cattle.

Bluetongue outbreak detected in Denmark

Denmark has had its first case of Bluetongue - in a sheep herd near Sakskobing on the island of Lolland, south of Zealand, the European Commission said today (See Alertnet.) Denmark has reported this first case as an outbreak.
It will be remembered that the UK dithered from the time of its first case on September 22 until - finally - on September 28 Defra, in the person of Fred Landeg, accepted that the UK "had an outbreak".

In the midst of a serious crisis gripping agriculture, he chose to make a statement about banning energy-sapping light bulbs

2007-10-13T17:30:00.000+02:00

The FWi reports that poor Hilary Benn, when confronted by some very anxious and angry farmers at Skipton Auction Mart, could do no more, than try to defend himself behind Defra Spinspeak. But with people who have no problem with actual English, such phrases as "we are working closely with supermarkets" and "we want to increase the promotion of British meat" cut no ice.
"Mr Benn was generous with platitudes..."

As the FWi says, they "served only to expose the minister's failure to grasp what is really at stake here..."

"But, then, this is a man who in the midst of a serious crisis gripping agriculture, chose to make a statement at his party's annual conference about the banning of energy-sapping light bulbs by 2012.."

Not much illumination from that quarter. But we are reaping a very grim harvest. The centralisation of agriculture - all the ropes having been delivered up into the hands of DEFRA - and the UK's increasing dependence on the Brussels "one size fits all" mentality has led only to mistrust, confusion and the erosion of common sense. Scotland is at breaking point with England over what it sees as duplicity. Wales, in parlous plight, can get no sense from its Minister of State.

"I have no knowledge of your allegations, nor does my office, and I do not accept them." Peter Hain

icWales quotes the Shadow Welsh Secretary, Cheryl Gillan, who last night accused Peter Hain of dismissing her concerns about compensation payments. She says that Mr Hain ".. is quick to exonerate himself from any blame on this issue." Mr Hain had replied to a letter from Ms Gillan by saying

“I have no knowledge of your allegations, nor does my office, and I do not accept them. Our Government and the Welsh Assembly Government recognise the huge damage caused by foot-and-mouth and will continue to support those farmers affected. As Secretary of State for Wales I will continue to ensure that the interests of Welsh farmers are properly represented."

And that was all. It left her wondering whether he had even bothered to discuss the matter with DEFRA and the Treasury. But he has so little time. Peter Hain is a man so busy that he must cope with the two jobs Gordon Brown gave him; Secretary of State for Wales and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Quite a plateful. He "cannot accept allegations of which he has no knowledge"? Such bizarre use of English makes one wonder yet again about how far our political masters still have mastery over their own language - or anything else.

"We orders the time of their birth and the time of their death - an' inbetween times we has a duty."

2007-10-13T16:45:00.000+02:00

The waste of the horribly named "welfare cull" is criminal - but many think that the live export of young lambs is too.
A memorable line in one of Terry Pratchett's novels is the wisdom of the old shepherd of the chalk downs who tells her granddaughter:

"We orders the time of their birth and the time of their death. In between times we has a duty."

We kill our livestock for our food certainly - but while they are alive and in our care would anyone dare to deny that "we has a duty"? Prolonged treatment that hurts or frightens them is callous exploitation; many would think that live export is just that. One comment today received by email gives pause for thought perhaps:

"The light lamb market is very heavily dependent on exports, as it is said that the British Consumer does not like small joints (no one has asked me..) It seems that some rationalisation of the sheep market and our 40 million sheep is long overdue.
If we were geared to exporting lamb as dead meat we could have supplied the starving of Darfur and achieved two humanitarian aims at a stroke - some help for starving humans and a more welfare friendly approach to lambs.
A third benefit would have been a better market price for farmers and this might be the one that appeals to the industry."

What does the UK think it is doing justifying the killing and burning of lambs, such as the Scottish Blackface and the Cheviot, with the unquestioned assumption, as in the Herald, that "the consumer here demands a 15kg to 16kg deadweight carcass"? In 2005, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, said,

"Blackface Lamb is some of the most delicious I have ever tasted. There is no question in my mind that the diet of heather and moorland grasses give it a distinctive and special flavour,and the two year old mutton hung for a full two weeks is particularly outstanding"

If the River Cottage Chef thinks such breeds delicious at two years could these animals not have more of a life and be spared the horrors of the journey to the Mediterranean slaughterhouses? Who decided that we no longer care for mutton?

A kind-hearted emailer, Roger, wrote yesterday:

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the Brecon area of Wales doing some business. Obviously, these "light" lambs were everywhere.
I`ve stayed at various places in West Wales and evenings I like to take a walk across hills and down dales where these innocents are in abundance.
You can sit to take in the view and these little things will appear from nowhere. They will wander up to you with no fear and some will even let you give `em a tickle under the chin whilst mum watches close by. Although enjoying the experience and admiring their beauty and friendliness, I have to have it ruined by the knowledge that they are mostly destined to be herded into huge trucks to be carted off to goodness knows where in Europe and possibly beyond - often without proper care nor food and water. It is a horrible business.
So, I am beginning to wonder if it is not kinder to have them culled over here. At least they will not have to suffer that awful journey.
I know that Waitrose take these lambs. Why can`t other supermarkets?"

Much to ponder here.

Official case numbers have reached a staggering 30 thousand plus

2007-10-12T18:15:00.000+02:00

(red areas show bluetongue Zone F i.e. BTV-8 affected areas)

Astonishing and alarming spread in Europe Warmwell is very grateful to Sabine Zentis for this overview of present numbers of BTV-8 cases in Europe.
As she says,

".. the official case numbers have reached a staggering
30,000+ it is incomprehensible that so far no common strategy for the countries affected has been published."

We too are wondering what conclusions can be reached about possible future strategies from the various consultations that have been going on throughout Europe to combat "this major crisis for the livestock sector of Western Europe"

DEFRA agrees to movement to abattoirs - but the French system is still much more free

"new measures to relieve pressure within the Bluetongue zones" announces DEFRA (Oct 12) "Markets within the Bluetongue Control and Protection Zones will be permitted from midnight Sunday 14 October. The movement of susceptible animals from within the Control and Protection Zones to approved slaughterhouses outside the Bluetongue Zones will also be permitted from this time."

This news was greeted by the Core Stakeholders - but there are complications. "Approved" slaughterhouses means that those outside the Bluetongue Zones have to apply to the Meat Hygiene Service to be allowed to take animals from within the Control and Protection Zones. The conditions under which animals are going to move to slaughter are looking very stringent.
They have to move before dusk - and the time limits, soon to be announced, look very difficult to fulfil.
This contrasts greatly with the situation in France where animals from the PZ can be sent into the BT free zone for breeding or finishing after they have been serologically tested and a "desinsectisation" begun at least 28 days before being removed.
Abattoirs in France must give priority to animals from PZ but they are given 48 hours to process the animals after they leave the restricted zone. See (in french) Fièvre Catarrhale Ovine (FCO)
Note d'Information N° 7

IAH's "rapid diagnosis and detective work" still fails to find active pre-clinical FMD virus quickly enough

IAH BBSRC's Statement14 claims of rapid diagnosis do not make clear that the pen-side tests being used do not - as the state-of-the-art machines used elsewhere do - indicate the presence of pre-clinical desease

"..tests for the presence of virus on infected premises 6 and 7 were done in the evening/night time and daytime, respectively. On both occasions Test 1 (using a lateral flow device, rather like a pregnancy test gave a positive result within an hour. Interestingly, this test was actually performed on the farm (“pen-side”) in the case of IP7"

Perhaps so, but the positive result the test found was for antigen. What we have needed all along was the rapid on-site RT-PCR tests that can find disease in animals before they show any clinical signs at all. It doesn't matter how quickly the penside lateral flow device is used at the lab or on the farm - it is designed to detect antigen and this can only be detected from lesions. The animals must have developed lesions, hence the instruction to look for lesions twice a day, before the penside test can be used at all.

It is so obviously better to pick up infection before it reaches the stage when a number of animals can be seen to be clinically infected.

So although IAH's statement claims that
"A positive result in the very rapid Test 1 is of itself sufficient to show that FMD virus is present. Consequently IAH was able to tell Defra within an hour of the test being started that a premises did indeed have FMD virus, enabling Defra to take action"
the "action" was always going to be along the lines of stable door slamming after the horse was already far away.

"a pretty shabby way to treat a national emergency"

2007-10-12T11:00:00.000+02:00

Is Westminster going to rue the day it quietly airbrushed away an allocation of nearly £15 million in foot and mouth compensation for Scotland and Wales once it had been decided not to call an election?
Alex Salmond says, "This is a pretty shabby way to treat a national emergency. It flies in the face of the Prime Minister's rhetoric on facing the emergency of foot and mouth"
In Wales, Rural Affairs minister Elin Jones said the decision was "disappointing" adding that the costs of foot-and-mouth should be met by the UK government: "I hope the Treasury will accept its responsibility."

And the MP for Shewsbury,Daniel Kawczynski, was particularly unamused to see Gordon Brown "sitting through the debate smiling and laughing...totally inappropriate to an issue is of such gravity"

"We must all work together to ensure that the Government is held to account over this disaster and their wholly inadequate response to it."

Now that literally thousands of cattle destined for slaughter in the Bluetongue zone cannot cross the DEFRA imposed line to the abbatoirs, we are going to see meat shortages in the supermarkets. People will at last begin to notice that something in our green and pleasant land is deeply wrong. Although meat exports were allowed to resume today from areas considered at low risk from both FMD and Bluetongue - which excludes parts of south-east England and East Anglia, there are nevertheless so many exceptions to this that the volume of exports will not be great. The limited lifting of the export ban will come too late for producers of light lambs. They are in no fit condition to be processed and, even if they could be, the backlog could not be processed quickly enough.
From next Wednesday (October 17) the 20-day standstill rule is likely to be relaxed in the Low Risk foot-and-mouth area of England. That too will be a relief but within the Bluetongue zone things are dire.
An estimated 8,000 cattle inside the bluetongue control zone are normally killed for meat every week but within the zone there are only enough slaughterhouses to process 2,500. On the other side of the imaginary line abbatoirs are operating at only 25 per cent capacity because so many of the cattle they need are on the wrong side of the line.

DEFRA, as incarnated by Fred Landeg, has said that current control and protection zones will remain in place until the end of summer 2008 "at the earliest"

He is apparently closing his mind to the fact that bluetongue does not spread from animal to animal.
The Farmers Guardian quotes the National Beef Association vice-chairman, Frank Momber:

"Government seems to have no appreciation of just how many cattle are on big feeding units in the East of England and just how meagre the slaughter facilities are. It must, at the very least, allow finished cattle to be transported out of the BT zone for processing...."

Something must be done or farmers will go out of business in droves. Supermarkets will stock their empty shelves with cheap imports and, as Frank Momber says,

"a vital section of our national industry will be suffocated"

Rather than extending the zone the government should give permission for all movements directly to slaughter to be allowed outside the zone to the nearest abbatoirs.
(Update Late today Oct 12 DEFRA announced that movement outside the zone to slaughter will, after all, be allowed. See above.)
The French allow movements from any area in their bluetongue zone to slaughter "desinsectisation + abbatage dans les 48hrs" Clearly if this had been foolish their zone would have extended over the whole of France by now.

When midge activity stops in the colder weather,a few weeks at most, animals for breeding could be be allowed to be moved once blood tests have given a negative result for the BT virus.

it has been a costly and bloody gamble not to vaccinate - and madness not to use state-of -the -art diagnosis

But the costs of disease, like a hand grenade whose pin has been pulled out by Pirbright, is being tossed to the farmers. It is almost beyond belief that the "cost sharing" plan has not been shelved in deep embarrassment following the escape of virus from Pirbright. But no. We hear today that Kevin Pearce told the NFU council this week that although the consultation due for September had been suspended there will come a time when talks will resume. Many farmers think the farming industry should refuse to enter into talks until 'the polluter pays in full' for the damage caused by the Pirbright foot-and-mouth leak - and even then to expect the farmers not only to pay the piper but have a chaotic department like DEFRA calling the tune is a nonsense too far.

The very best plan we have seen to make shared costs and responsibility between government and farming actually work is one which involves proper bench marks to be adhered to by both sides. It can be read in full here

Since IP6, IP7 and IP8 had fresh disease present (FMD lesions discovered were only between 1 and 4 days old) one cannot be certain of anything and it has been a costly and bloody gamble not to vaccinate; it will not be forgetten that DEFRA announced that the virus had been contained after IP2 only to have it reappear on September 12.

This strain of the virus, 01 BFS1860, has produced such mild symptoms that many animals recovered before the slow UK tests showed they had had the disease. That has not prevented the killing of about 2000 animals, mostly negative post mortem. What is so hard to bear - quite apart from the vaccination question - is the fact that for six years the UK has ignored available rapid diagnostic on-site tests that can diagnose pre clinical disease. These portable, simple kits would have saved the healthy animals, including the hand-reared pet lambs culled out near IP8, and saved so much of the misery we'd hoped after 2001 never to see again.

The whole affair has highlighted yet again the fact that foot and mouth is a political and economic disease

"Man has decidedly botched up the planet"

2007-10-11T17:45:00.000+02:00

Most of the media continues to behave as if there is no problem. There is. An ever-descending black despair is with us. You cannot "snap out of" this one.

The stranglehold restrictions put in place to "control" foot and mouth and bluetongue show what happens if you allow animal health to pass out of the hands of those who know and care and into the surreal dreamworld of politics.
First came the EU legislation, the Directives and the Statutory Instruments. Then the 2002 Animal Health Act tidied up the loopholes. And then April Fool's Day this year saw the creation of "Animal Health" an outpost of Defra-world that merged - in the name of efficiency and as per the Hampton Review - the State Veterinary Service (SVS) the Dairy Hygiene Inspectorate (DHI), the Wildlife Licensing and Registration Service (WLRS,including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species CITES), and the Egg Marketing Inspectorate (EMI).
Does anyone pretend that this was more than a money saving confidence trick?

Better animal health policies were not the aim. Just the determination to keep ever tighter controls on those producing food.

"We all welcome this merger," enthused Glenys Stacey, Chief Executive of the monster, using a Defra-dialect unknown in the civilised world, "it will deliver more comprehensively and with the customer in mind."

So, like passengers of British Rail, like wrongs hushed up, we are "customers", herded into a corner and comprehensively delivered into the iron grasp of DEFRA - for which we do indeed pay but for which there is no customer service. The only communications are glossy pamphlets with mind numbing demands for compliance or expressions of self congratulation (The Defra-slogan now seems to be "Enabling everyone to live within our environmental means" a piece of meaningless Defra-drivel for which we also undoubtedly paid.)
There is no remorse and no apology in Defra-world. And no criticism allowed. The 2002 Animal Health Act saw to that.

And so, with extreme sadness, we turn to this extract from an article online at www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs by Carla Carlisle with her ultimately doomed non-customer approach:

I am advised to 'check livestock twice daily'.
And this I do, taking buckets of extra feed, an apronful of windfalls, treats that make me welcome. We have two breeds. The Shetlands, small and gentle, look like the 'earth colours' section on paint charts. Born black, they evolve into taupe, chestnut, dark chocolate. If I sit on the ground, they come up to me, curious, concerned, and if I stay long enough, the older ewes lie down beside me. Then there are the Jacobs, dappled, scatty sheep with attention deficit disorders, courteous but wary.

I cannot claim that these sheep are vital to the financial future of this farm, but they provide a rhythmic sympathy with the earth that justifies everything we do here. They provide the grazing essential to the maintenance of the wildflower meadow.... Morning and evening, I check for signs of swelling and listen to the breathing beneath the symphony of crunching sheep nuts. And I pray for cold and rain. This depression doesn't feel like cowardice. It feels like the despair that André Gide described when he wrote that 'melancholy occasionally wins out: man has decidedly botched up the planet'. It is the despair of knowing that last winter was the second warmest on record, and there is no health in it.

A coming national catastrophe - hidden away in the Letters pages

2007-10-11T11:48:00.000+02:00

"We must seriously consider vaccination - soon..." writes a farmer, Sarah Birchall, from inside what she calls "Bluetongue Island". This is in the Telegraph - but the crisis she describes, which is no less than the possible end of farming in the UK, is still confined to the letters pages

".....Does anybody care or even begin to understand the predicament the industry is now in? Customers for these animals lie to the west of the zone, as does the winter grazing.
Normal trade has ceased. Ten livestock markets are unable to trade, and risk extinction. Countless jobs and livelihoods will be lost.
Do those who spend their whole lives working the land count for so very little? Is most of our food destined to come from abroad?
....The aid announced following the foot and mouth crisis has done nothing to help those in the bluetongue zone. Bluetongue is much worse, and will probably never completely go away. We must seriously consider vaccination - soon..."

Many people are so cut off from the realities of food production as they wander up and down the aisles of their supermarket tossing plastic wrapped packets into their trolleys that they never give farming a thought. Soon it will be too late. Before the general public are given to understand the dire position into which we are sliding, farmers will have given up in despair and this will lead to a change the consequences of which can hardly be imagined.

"....more than 30 animals have been put down."

Animals put down because of Bluetongue? See /ukpress.google.com The lack of information from DEFRA is disgraceful - see latest Declaration (pdf). All we are getting from the egregious Mr Landeg is an inappropriate tone of command. "I continue to urge all farmers to remain vigilant, check their animals twice daily and report any sign of disease immediately." The impertinence of this is truly staggering. Farmers are to report immediately - but DEFRA's communication with them is virtually non existent.
What species are infected? What is the mortality rate? Where are the confirmed cases? Why should animals be being put down when culling serves no purpose? Why does the DEFRA map not show confirmed cases? Why is DEFRA information so at odds with others we have seen such as that on the Swiss veterinary website (see below)? Why has the lack of proper testing and surveillance led to such ignorance of the true picture? There may be perfectly adequate and reasonable answers to these questions - but without those answers one is left with a question that towers over all the rest: Why is this distressing situation being exacerbated by an incompetent, secretive Ministry that seems to be doing as much harm as good?

"Mystery of the Missing Millions"

Reported in the Herald, is a Scots farmer watching not only his own livelihood slip away but the future too.

".... if the politicians don't act there won't be hill farms here any more. If that happens, I simply don't know what I would do, nor does my son."

London support? The wooden hearts and heads at Westminster are embarrassed to find that a particularly cynical decision has come to light. The draft copy of Hilary Benn's Ministerial Statement (the one with which Mr Benn seemed strangely unfamiliar - see here) said "...Scotland should receive £8.1million and Wales £6.5m to assist them in countering the impacts of foot and mouth on their livestock farmers...." But once a decision had been reached not to call an election, this changed to

"I am announcing today a package of assistance for the English livestock sector, amounting to £12.5m. The devolved administrations are proposing to introduce their own schemes." Those eight millions have evaporated. Scotland's SNP "Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself" - (here) is demanding an explanation. Wales in is the same miserable boat.

Rules bending with the wind

2007-10-11T00:33:00.000+02:00

An email from Alan Beat points out the curious case of the bending rules. Although EU rules state very firmly that exports may resume only when - in the case of non-vaccination - three months have elapsed since the last case -(rules that are agreed internationally by the OIE)- we now see Brazil (using vaccination)facing a 2 month ban only, for the FMD affected region only; while the UK (using slaughter only) can start trading again from unaffected regions just a few days after the latest case on October 12 (And there is of course no certainty that it will prove to be the last case, the bloody firebreak killing that went on around IP8 notwithstanding).
So Alan Beat asks why, if the rules can be broken to regionalise the affected and vaccinated area and restart trading everywhere else, this cannot happen in the UK too and vaccination be adopted instead of merely considered. "Or am I missing something?" he asks.

Oct 11 2007 ~ Dispatches from the front line 2007 October

"I regret that we are finding DEFRA absolutely unbending on almost every issue. We are having the threat of closure waved at us almost every day by jumped up little officials behaving like Nazi prison guards. Somehow they think we can control what clothes farmers wear to come ..... We understand the need for waterproofs but short of having a gate guard who examines each farmer, I am not sure what we can do.
Most of us feel that the continued imposition of the 20 day rule is unnecessary especially since we could not really be further from the source of the (DEFRA cock-up) outbreak but no, they will not budge...."

2001 November (Westmorland Gazette)

"....Come on ministers, surprise me and tell us the way forward for British Agriculture.
You say you want a strong, vibrant agriculture, well you could have fooled me; so come on show me how wrong I have been.
You may remember I told you about the government taking powers to seize one's cattle and sheep with no right of appeal.

If that would not mean we were living in a police state, well you could have fooled me.

I also said that what Elliott Morley (minister) would be better doing, was adopting the test for foot-and-mouth disease perfected by Professor Fred Brown of the United States Research Centre at Plum Island....."

Six years on. And the same frustrations expressed. The same arrogant, jack-booted mentality that "knew best" in 2001 is still goose-stepping over the efforts and advice of those who want to help keep Britain farming. And what was written by the same farming commentator, six years ago in October 2001, on the subject of emergency ring vaccination, makes DEFRA's lack of progress seem even more unbelievable, incomprehensible, tyrannical.

Tilting at Windmills

2007-10-10T21:06:00.000+02:00

DEFRA in Dreamland
Commenting on the announcement that the PZ for Bluetongue has indeed been expanded, deputy chief veterinary officer Fred Landeg, quoted in Farmers Weekly, said: "Finding further cases is not unexpected, particularly given the nature of the disease, and we expect to see more cases before the end of the active midge season this winter. If we are to contain the disease within the Control and Protection Zone, we must have an accurate picture of how far the disease has spread."
But even for Fred Landeg midges will not behave in a regimented and acceptable manner. Unlike the rest of his department midges dare to cross red lines. Which is precisely why random blood checks around the control zone, preferably in cattle, should have been carried out long ago. Surveillance and testing has been woeful and this applies to Foot and Mouth too. DEFRA's position is still "wait and hope" and their location - according to commentators at one EU meeting who must remain anonymous - is "dreamland".
Will Mr Landeg be ordering men in white suits to place sticky nets around the perimeter of the new zone?"Unless one plans to concrete the whole country these isolated measures won't have any influence on vector numbers..." writes Sabine Zentis from the heart of midge infested Germany.
While one would not put it past the present incumbents to want to concrete over the whole country, the unfortunate fact remains that bluetongue is not going to be fought off by anything short of vaccine. There may be some short term measures and an interesting article appeared in the Farmers Guardian today on the subject - but our German correspondent, about as experienced as we're going to find, has written a commentary which warns

....the use of these products only had a very minimal, if any effect on infections....The problem is the vast amount of culicoides, there are gazillions around and because of their numbers these measures don't work satisfactorily My private view :
The whole insecticide exercise gave people the feeling of at least doing SOMETHING but the use as a means to prevent Bluetongue is questionable. We did it all - from as early as April, - pour on, ear clips containing deltamethrine, Ivermectine - but with approx. 20% of animals clinically affected and an unknown number of subclinically infected animals I don't see this as a big success.
It is a Don Quixote fight...."

The massive accumulation of red dots says it all

2007-10-10T17:54:00.000+02:00

Far more revealing than anything seen on the DEFRA website is this bluetongue map - (pdf slow link works eventually on IE- but Firefox still seems unwilling to open this file. Apologies) available on line as a pdf file from the Bvet. admin site in Switzerland, showing the relentless march of bluetongue across Europe. (As the pdf file opens the red dots appear with a rapidity that mirrors the cases themselves.) Switzerland is anxiously awaiting its first case and sees the whole picture - including the new cases in Essex and outside London that reveal the scale of the impending disaster.

Meanwhile there are unconfirmed reports that the UK Bluetongue Protection Zone has been expanded (34 cases now . We note the four red dots in the vicinity of Folkstone and wonder why DEFRA has not thought to mention Kent. But clear, trustworthy communication is another lesson unlearned by DEFRA - which is, of course, why this website came into being in the first place.)

UPDATE Oct 11 We hear from a reliable source that there are no cases in Kent. Some crossed wire it seems - but we hope this is going to be made officially clear.
Alistair Driver writes in the Farmers Guardian

"If confirmed by Defra today, it will be the first clear indication that the disease has spread beyond the local area near Ipswich where it was first discovered. While this is a worrying development, particularly for those now drawn into the zone, it will reportedly bring two more abattoirs into the Protection Zone."

Of course there is a desperate shortage of slaughter houses throughout Britain let alone in the Bluetongue Protection Zone - as per the legacy of a succession of lunatic policies involving spurious health and safety concerns for "EU export standards". In reality the enthusiasm of MAFF vets to increase their power and influence in the 1980s was gleefully supported by the big slaughterhouses who were delighted to see - as a result of the one-size-fits-all "harmonisation" of regulation 91/497/EEC - the medium sized and the small family abattoirs go to the wall.

" If it indeed it is a true case of infection in situ in England, I would fully expect the epidemic to take off next year."
Professor N. James MacLachlan, of the School of Veterinary Medicine University of California Davis, says that the virus proved between 2006 and 2007 that it could overwinter in northern Europe, "so I don’t think the English winter will exterminate it." (See egghead Blog at UC Davis)

MacLachlan says that the btv-8 strain is unusually virulent in cattle and goats and also

"appears to have found a new insect partner to transmit itself....The sobering reality is that this might just be a portent of things to come regarding climate change and the spread of vector borne diseases, especially other Culicoides transmitted viruses like African horse sickness...."

Meanwhile, another sobering reality - the mass killing of light lambs and the price crash for lamb both at the abattoir and the sale of breeding ewes and ewe lambs is a portent of miseries to come.
The media are steering well clear of reporting distressing scenes and so the general public have simply no idea of the desperate seriousness of the present situation for all livestock farmers - not only those completely stalled in the various zones.

Will the lambs simply be left there?

Ruth Watkins sums it up

"...went to our white faced ewe sale yesterday to sell a pen of 10 ewe lambs.
They were as good as I can produce... I got £19 a head for my ewe lambs, I was last and decided I had to sell them otherwise I could not sell my heifers next week in the annual sale of pedigree Welsh Black cattle at Llandovery. 2 buyers bid against each other so that £17 went up to £19.

Would I have had any buyers at all if others had sold their ewe lambs? Most did not sell and were not even bid £20 for a ewe lamb - and most farmers would not contemplate selling below £30 or even £25. They might get £29 now at the abattoir (mine were not quite ready for the abattoir but I do hope mine will be used for breeding. I know they will make lovely ewes, my shearling ewes this year are my best ever and I am keeping them all). The farmers were shell shocked.

If they take them back what will they do with them? Some farmers had gone by the time their ewes came into the pen. Will the lambs simply be left there? The auctioneers were selling them at any price subject to approval by the farmer, and if the farmer couldn't be contacted then they were sold for the auctioneer Christmas fund...."

"The attempt to pin the blame on Merial was shabby and dishonest"

2007-10-10T00:27:00.000+02:00

In Monday's debate (Hansard) , Peter Ainsworth went on the attack, accusing the government of picking on a scapegoat to mask its own negligence: "Will the Secretary of State confirm that, by a cruel twist of irony, work on a vaccine to protect against bluetongue has been put on hold? When does he now expect a bluetongue vaccine to be available?"
But no answers to his questions were forthcoming.

None of Hilary Benn's ponderous replies throughout the next hour gave any hint that he was even aware that his Department had stopped production. Is it possible he not quite taken in that part of his own Ministerial Statement that spoke of the "rigorous Improvement Plan" for the Pirbright site, to be

"implemented before full operations with live viruses can recommence"?

Apparently unable to see that his "rigorous plan" was putting an indefinite stop to production, he even followed Henry Bellingham's warning that bluetongue had the capacity totally to devastate the livestock industry with this blithe assertion:

"...the best route for preventing the
situation that the hon. Gentleman
describes is to develop a vaccine as quickly as
possible, and to make sure that it is used to protect livestock."

Well yes Minister - but in the course of the hour long debate on FMD and Bluetongue, nothing more was said to answer Peter Ainsworth's questions about when that vaccine was going to be allowed to see the light of day.
We learnt only that the review Sir Bill Callaghan is to carry out does not even report until December...by which time the overwintering midges will be on the point of gathering themselves for a new assault on the unprotected livestock of Europe.

Oct 10 ~ " ...vaccination was rejected then, and it appears that vaccination has been rejected once more. Will the Secretary of State tell me why it has been rejected and under what circumstances we will use vaccine in the future?"

Monday's debate

misleading information

"We will amend the NFU vaccination Q&A to clarify the issue of safety around an FMD vaccine and thank you for pointing out the potential confusion that could have been caused by our original text."

"clear shortcomings" - clear to all but Mr Benn

2007-10-09T10:05:00.000+02:00

Oct 9 ~ "We have absolutely no faith in Defra.."

"...which must own up to its legal and moral responsibility to compensate farmers for its clear shortcomings. If we do not receive some better news [on livestock movements] there is every prospect that we will be out on the streets before the end of this week, and that has not happened for a very long time."

the Scotsman

"but the strictures on livestock movements make it all but impossible"

Oct 9 ~ DEFRA's "professionalism, dedication and commitment" is praised by the Minister

Hilary Benn

"It cannot be said with complete certainty exactly how the virus escaped from the Pirbright site..."

Telegraph

"....we are determined that it does not happen again," asserts poor Mr Benn,"I have accepted all of the recommendations in the reports from the HSE and
Professor Spratt."

recommendations of various reports

(See Bluetongue page at warmwell.com )

A dry statistical exercise - or flesh, blood, tears, sweat and heartbreak

2007-10-08T15:19:00.000+02:00

Oct 8 2007 ~ John Beddington and "the job from hell"

Sir

Guardian

"For a hint of what is to come, simply contemplate the procession of horrors, heartaches and howlers that have mugged the world's scientific advisers during the last three decades.."

Oct 8 2007 ~ While Professor King may be an international expert in many, many things it is a tragedy for the UK that he has been directing policy on Foot and Mouth ..

(it performed extremely well in Uruguay in 2001, similar devices are now used in many countries, and a prototype of a "next generation" device intended for point of need PCR testing across all of animal and plant agriculture and the food industry will be demonstrated in Brussels next week)

Radio 4 transcript

warmwell files

24 January 2005

"....Government's plans for tackling a future outbreak of foot and mouth disease have been thrown into disarray after the government's Chief Scientist suggested that vaccination was still not a practical option for controlling the disease.
.... His comments will fuel fears that the Government has done little more than pay lip service to vaccination... appear to directly contradict the official policy of the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which suggests that it would give early consideration to using vaccination in any future outbreak.."

Monday Oct 8 2007 ~"...powerless
to stop it, while pointlessly disrupting the habits and interests of livestock owners by bringing commercial transactions to a standstill"

Abigail Woods

"In rural
areas where foot and mouth disease holds sway, nothing, at least up to the present day, has
been able to halt its progress. Suffice it to say
that, among the regulatory sanitary measures
applicable to contagious diseases in general, none apart from the obligation to declare the presence of the disease to the authorities, could reasonably be applied to this disease: no matter how benign the measure, it would undoubtedly be excessive, or would be powerless to stop it, while pointlessly disrupting the habits and
interests of livestock owners by bringing commercial transactions to a
standstill” (Translated from the french Reynal J. Traite´ de police sanitaire des animaux domestiques. Paris: Asselin; 1873. p. 1012.)

"This contempt for agriculture will produce a crisis beside which everything seen so far will pale into insignificance"

2007-10-07T22:32:00.000+02:00

Christopher Booker's column in the Sunday Telegraph today concerns the plight of the sheep farmers who are about to see "huge quantities of perfectly safe meat, from animals in Scotland, Wales and parts of England.... incinerated, at further cost to farmers, who will see most of their year's income go up in smoke." The article illustrates Mr Booker's ability to see not only the plight of the UK trees under the shadow of the EU wood - but also to project that vision into the bleak future.

"With this latest foot and mouth disaster, bluetongue, the farm payments fiasco (which has cost Britain £400 million in lost EU subsidies), the bovine TB epidemic estimated to cost taxpayers £2 billion by 2014, and much else, there seems no end to the crises our farmers must endure. Most have been caused, or made far worse, by our Government's own limitless incompetence.

A large part of the problem is that farming and the need to provide the nation with food could scarcely have been pushed further down this urban Government's agenda."

Warmwell knows that each of these issues is of concern to readers of the site. The RPA page's latest entry almost defies belief, the bluetongue page continues to illustrate the UK's deafness and insularity. The TB page deplores the UK intransigence over rapid diagnosis and its preference for killing cows than for seeking solutions. As for the "need to provide the nation with food" this will be more and more urgently understood - as we explained below. And the contemptuous fiddling at DEFRA can only bring closer the burning problems of the future.

Escape is possible from the mad, bad destructive regulations over which we have so little control. There are now so many voices crying in the wilderness that the combined roar must surely soon wake the sleepwalking nation from its nightmare slide towards ruin - but time is short.

"No, we can do better than that"

2007-10-07T13:30:00.000+02:00

Virologist Dr Colin Fink replies to the paragraph on warmwell.com about last Wednesday's edition of Farming Today. Extract from email:

"The epidemiologist's views about vaccine do not accord with my own. If you ring vaccinate, of course new animals could not be moved into the ring unless also vaccinated, for safety reasons concerning vaccination being complete. There would have to be a pause whilst the vaccine took effect and was completed ....newer vaccines would create an unsusceptible population and the infection would simply melt away. ..... I do not share the concern about 'accidents with vaccine' and the contention that some of the vaccine is actually live virus, surely can be discounted..... The question of 'expense' has several interpretations: How do you put a price on a family's generations of work in breeding stock or the loss for marginal farmers and the burden for all of us of their lives ruined..."
Dr Fink concludes with a reference to what he feels is "the medieval approach from DEFRA " and says, "No, we can do better than that."

On the Farming Today website itself, it is good to see Lawrence Wright's comment about ring vaccination and the "ridiculous and outdated trade penalty on the use of vaccination" He says "...It would also allow movement rules for animals outside the area of the infection to be relaxed with confidence. The NFU should be joining the voices asking for a change.."

Oct 7 2007 ~ Counting the cost

With IP6, IP7 and IP8 indicating disease newly caught, it is perhaps a little surprising to hear such bland assurances from the Landeg camp that all is now probably over. They may be right. We all hope so. According to the NFU's Anthony Gibson, since August:

...we think the total cost to the farming industry is around 250 million pounds in terms of lost exports and lower meat prices.

Quite apart from the money spent on all the scurrying work of SVS ("Animal Health") vets and surveillance work, the vaccinating teams too have been kept on a fruitless standby in order to fulfil the terms of the government's own requirement in the Animal Health Act to be seen to be "considering vaccination".

As for the wasted animals themselves; the official total in slaughtered animals - pedigree cattle, calves, sheep, pigs and one lone goat - is now over 1800. These figures include over 800 pigs - all of which tested negative.

The cost in human stress and anxiety can hardly be measured - but some small indication comes from the account written by Rachel Archer from her farm near Maidenhead and published in Farmers Weekly. At one point she says:

Word is that the cattle that were culled on Friday (i.e.Sept 21) were given the all clear by DEFRA just two days previously. Also, because this is a laboratory strain of the virus, they say it is not behaving like the 2001 outbreak.

One of the features of this 1967 virus is the very mildness of its symptoms. Not unnaturally is it hard to detect. It affects the animals only slightly. They recover fast and from then on the miracle of the immune system, shared by all mammals, ensures that they cannot get reinfected by that strain.

It is these animals, recovered and invulnerable, that have to be tracked down and slaughtered, along with their healthy fellows and any so-called "dangerous contacts" so that the UK may retain its coveted "FMD free" status. The other victims, never mentioned, are the several thousand animals, many of them exported for breeding, that were trapped in transit on the occasions in August and in September that FMD was discovered. They too were summarily killed.

Oct 7 2007 ~ "information on the DEFRA web site is no good to those of us farming within the control zones"

Mrs Archer's account (Farmers Weekly) mentions a fact that will resonate in the memories of all who suffered in 2001 where she has to,

... speak to another friend within the Protection Zone. This is the only way to find out what is really going on, the information on the DEFRA web site is no good to those of us farming within the control zones.

Perhaps the saddest of all is the realisation at the end of her account that while her own farm seems miraculously to be safe, that of her friends, Nigel and Sally, is to be sacrificed:

Their youngstock on two units are being culled as a firebreak. Even though they have all been tested this week and are clean. As we end the call my eyes are full of tears. Why didn't DEFRA stamp on this outbreak two weeks ago?"

Or, as we would say, why was the escape not contained 60 days ago when we had knowledge of the strain, the supply of appropriate vaccine and the ability to stop the spread. The phrase "Protection Zone" would then have had some meaning.

Ruth Watkins - watching with pain

2007-10-06T21:27:00.000+02:00

On foot and mouth, she writes: "When epidemiologists are wheeled out of IAH and refuse to acknowledge the usefulness of vaccination against FMD I am still surprised, though I should not be.."

Ruth Watkins, the virologist who, like so many of us, has been watching the progress of the foot and mouth outbreak with such pain, says inthis email today that a very useful web site contains a slide showing the timeline of the first 7 IPs (slide number 12).

If an epidemiologist looked at it, it should strike him that if we had vaccinated immediately upon finding the IP 3 at Egham (having the vaccinators on standby and some 300,000 doses of vaccine ready) infection at IP 7 and IP 8 could have been prevented."

She adds that it seems as though the effect of DEFRA's policy on farming has been disproportionate even if tourism has not been quite as badly hit as in 2001. She feels that "DEFRA employees haven't read the reports following the 2001 outbreak and still think of "costs" as being those that DEFRA would shell out to put vaccinator teams on standby and doses of vaccine at the ready - ie internal costs."

Since FMD is not endemic in Western Europe, routine vaccination is not therefore necessary - which is why there are the banks of vaccine to all serotypes of FMD kept at the ready to use for emergency vaccination to control an incursion, or escape from a laboratory.

As for bluetongue: "UK farmers haven't understood the implications of declaring GB as a BT zone... "

The problem, says Sabine Zentis, (not only an expert in this disease but also a prize-winning breeder of English Longhorns) is that UK farmers haven't understood the implications of declaring GB as a BT zone so that internal movements can happen. Next year things are going to be very much worse.

Frau Zentis writes,

This might be due to the fact that Fred Landeg was quoted as saying that the disease might die out during the winter. The NFU chairman of the Suffolk National Farmers' Union should look over his fence; he's seen only the start of BT but by next year he's going to have to prepare himself for real losses.

Landeg is repeating the same wishful thinking that has been the main policy in Germany and he seems to ignore the fact that this disease just doesn't go away because a vet says so...

October 6th ~ "movements straight to abattoirs outside the restricted zones should be permitted as soon as possible."

Sabine Zentis says," There is no risk involved if animals are slaughtered within a short period of time, say 24 hours."

But plans to resume movement country wide without vector surveillance showing that no culicoides are active because of low temperatures are extremely unwise. While it might seem fine in the UK this year with a low viral load and perhaps not too many culicoides infected, it would be a recipe for disaster next year. Such free movements would increase the spread of BT enormously.

The consequences of a massive outbreak as in Northern Europe this year have been an absolute disaster for the sheep sector. On dairy farms even cows are dying of BTV 8 with some farmers losing on average 2 animals per week.

Since it is so important to prevent regions from getting infected by multiple serotypes, BT affected farmers can't export into free regions or regions under restrictions for another serotype. There is no cross protection between the 24 different serotypes. A different serotype can cause severe losses to cattle.

However, between the regions affected by the same serotype there are no restrictions in trade. Once the FMD restrictions are lifted the UK will be able to export animals from the BT restricted areas to all areas within the EU affected by the SAME serotype ( zone F). A note of caution from Frau Zentis:

"The legislation is very clear on lifting of restrictions to regain the status: country or region free of BT: a country has to prove by surveillance that for TWO YEARS no virus has been circulating."

Thus the UK must be free from BTV circulation during 2008 and 2009 if restrictions are to be lifted in 2010.

Lambs "starving in fields"

2007-10-05T12:52:00.000+02:00

Gordon Brown, we are told, is anxious that the electorate should think that FMD is an issue approaching history.

Yet The Scotsman today points out that lambs are now starving in the fields. The relaxation of restrictions on October 12 will come too late and not go far enough. "...few farmers will be able to meet the strict criteria on movements which threaten to lock up their businesses. The public perception and reality down on the farm are miles apart."

Dan Buglass says a proposal, to be discussed in Brussels later today, may allow for compensation following the killing and disposal of the now excess sheep, "but the cost will have to be picked up by the UK government."

He adds, "The hint of an impending general election is in the air, but the Prime Minister is keen to avoid a repeat of the scenario of 2001..." The public at large does not fully comprehend that small unwanted lambs are dying and bull calves are being born and then shot - all because of a disaster not of the farmers' making.

The animal loving public would be horrified - but as we have seen there is a deafening silence in most of the press about the handling of foot and mouth - and yet another anodyne "Review" is about to take place.

Sauce for both goose and gander

2007-10-05T10:36:00.000+02:00

The NFU has produced its position on blue tongue vaccination, coming out in favour and contrasting its position on FMD.

With FMD, it says, "it takes longer to remove trade restrictions in live animals from a country or zone that has used vaccination against FMD. In the case of BTV the vaccine that is being developed would allow you to distinguish between an animal that had been vaccinated and one exposed to the virus."

This statement is curiously back to front. The vital phrase in the case of BTV vaccine is "being developed". The NFU wants vaccine for Bluetongue because culling doesn't help and meat exports are not normally restricted. They do not want vaccine for FMD because trade suffers an extra three month ban (a ban that is irrational and ought to be changed).

The problem here for the NFU is that differentiating NSP tests for FMD vaccine are firmly established (Uruguay used one of them - the Panaftosa test) to demonstrate freedom of FMD infection with vaccination which was internationally accepted in 2001) while DIVA for bluetongue is not - it is still being developed.

Paul van Aarle of Intervet International wrote about the FMD test, stating that the main characteristics of Chekit-FMD-3ABC are:

The test is serotype specific.
Antibodies against 3ABC will be demonstrated as from 10-14 days after infection.
The test does not contain any infectious material and can be run in every laboratory, which is equipped for ELISA.
The test provides results within hours.

There should be very little problem, therefore, in distinguishing between animals that have been vaccinated and those which are harbouring the virus.

And for your next trick?

2007-10-05T09:15:00.000+02:00

Two long months ago Chris Huhne MP said:

The Government deserves congratulation for learning the lessons of its shambolic response to the devastating 2001 crisis by stopping all animal movements and preparing for vaccination of surrounding herds as soon as the virus is identified.

A clear lesson of the last outbreak was the need for speedy vaccination, so the isolation of the virus and a potential matching with banks of vaccine will be key.

The other priority has to be to keep rural communities informed as this is a time of high anxiety not just among farmers but also for those involved in rural tourism who were hard hit by an entirely unjustified wave of cancellations last time.

Has much been heard from Opposition parties since?

More slaughter

2007-10-04T16:10:00.000+02:00

This time IP8 - 95 cattle, 16 sheep and 1 goat - and four more herds killed too.

IP8 had 95 cattle, 16 sheep and 1 goat. We learned that FMD was detected in four animals (although now it looks as though it was only one) but the lesions were considered to be only 2 days old. There were no signs of old antibodies or active virus in the corpses of the others nor in those premises killed as so-called "dangerous contacts".

UPDATE: From the OIE "Holding comprising four premises - only one animal at one premises was affected according to preliminary laboratory results, animals at all four premises were stamped out for disease control purposes." i.e., 135 cows and 16 sheep. The goat is not mentioned by Dr Reynolds.

Knowledge that the lesions tested in IP8 proved to be the result of fresh infection must raise very serious questions about spread.

In the continuing absence of ring vaccination we can gloomily forecast further panicky killing without benefit of testing first.

All who have studied the question know that the technology to test accurately and rapidly on-site exists and works see here modern potent vaccines give solid protection after one injection for emergency vaccination (see here) No field work has EVER shown spread from vaccinated animals As for vaccine "masking disease" this fallacy needs to be urgently and publicly investigated - not reported in the press as fact. Animals are vaccinated in herds and from the outside inwards.

Even if vaccination came too late to prevent infection in the cases nearest the epicentre, there would be no subsequent spread. To hear ignorance among those directing the killing policy is heartbreaking in the extreme and one cannot but wonder what on earth is going on. Some have even suggested deliberate land clearance. The alternative seems to be dithering ignorance and incompetence on a tragic scale.

2007-10-03T22:09:00.000+02:00

"The decision would be adopted formally from October 12 but would enter into force only if there were no more outbreaks outside the affected area, the Commission said..." (Reuters)

Unfortunately "no more outbreaks outside the affected area" is looking a little unlikely since, without the confidence that ring vaccination would have brought, killing animals is the only way to attempt to kill the virus. The lesions on the cattle at "Infected Premises number 8" at Ankerdyke Farm, Wraysbury were only three-days old - putting paid to any idea that traces of the virus around Egham are the dying embers of disease that somehow got there from Pirbright. 3 day old lesions indicate active virus, not antibodies.

This virus is still very much on the move.

The pressure on DEFRA must be intense now to slaughter anything even remotely suspicious - and to do so fast and without bothering too much about test results - and this will be adding to the dread in the so ironically named "Protection" zone.

An example of such dread comes from today's emails

"If my beautiful pedigree Jersey herd is taken out because of the incompetence, ignorance and sheer bloody mindedness of DEFRA, the EU and that ridiculous Dr.Reynolds then they had better beware..."

As a ProMed moderator said on Oct 1st "Clearly, this outbreak is threatening to spread, and it is difficult to be confident that it will not spread extensively."

EU agrees changes to export rules

2007-10-03T18:51:00.000+02:00

Changes to meat and meat products export rules have been agreed in Brussels today.

The EU's Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health have today agreed a regionalised approach which frees up trade from some parts of Great Britain. This applies to meat and meat products from FMD susceptible species to other EU Member States.

DEFRA says, "changes are expected to come into effect on 12th October, subject to there being no change to the current disease situation."

Reuters says, "...EU veterinary experts backed a decision that "the whole of Great Britain would remain a high-risk area with regard to the movement restrictions for susceptible animals and untreated products.

The decision would be adopted formally from October 12 but would enter into force only if there were no more outbreaks outside the affected area, the Commission said...".