http://business.scotsman.com/agriculture.cfm?id=1509842006
How FMD crisis was turned into a disaster
TOBY Tennant, who farms at Shaws, Newcastleton, saw hundreds of his animals slaughtered during the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic.
One of the earliest critics of the Scottish Executive's attempts to control the spread of the disease, he remains convinced that there was a better way. The following is a letter to The Scotsman in which Tennant gives a very different appreciation of Jim Walker from the one published in these pages on Monday.
I READ with interest Fordyce Maxwell's article on Jim Walker ("The Walker way of influencing people but losing friends", 9 October.) Like him, I still have files of documents on the foot-and-mouth disaster of 2001 and, as he says, they recall months of despair in the countryside and beyond.
Maxwell then goes on to eulogise the leadership of Walker, then president of NFU Scotland, and even compares him to Churchill.
However, Maxwell also describes Walker as an "emotional, furious man in a hurry". This description helps to explain the irrational and ultimately disastrous policy followed by NFUS.
By ignoring modern veterinary science and the lessons of history (as set out in the Northumberland Report into the 1967 FMD epidemic), Walker ensured that a crisis became a disaster.
The most controversial aspect of the policy followed in 2001 was the replacement of ring vaccination, as recommended by Northumberland, with a contiguous cull of healthy animals. This led to the slaughter of an estimated ten million cattle and calves, sheep and lambs, in the UK. It was a policy that had never been tried anywhere in the world before, and one that ignored the fact that the strain of FMD virus that caused the 2001 epidemic had very limited ability to spread by air, particularly in sheep flocks. This crucial fact was known to top FMD experts, who were sidelined.
Walker was the leading proponent of the contiguous cull policy, which continues to be hailed by those responsible as a great success.
It is almost five years since confirmation of the last case of FMD in the UK. Since then, much research into data accumulated in 2001 has been published, including the work of Dr Michael Thrusfield at Edinburgh University and Dr Paul Kitching at the National Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases in Canada. Their work confirms that the 2001 epidemic was handled in an impractical, unscientific and inhumane way. In the words of the late Professor Fred Brown, it was "a disgrace to humanity".
Let one fact illustrate the point. The contiguous cull policy was ruthlessly applied in south-west Scotland, and the results were acclaimed by Walker, Ross Finnie and Maxwell as a great success. But of 15 so-called Infected Premises in Wigtownshire, 13 were tested in the laboratory and only two were positive. Yet on 218 farms thousands of healthy animals were culled as a result of these misdiagnoses. Success? Or disaster?
To anyone with an open mind, these facts speak for themselves. Until influential figures take the trouble to understand what happened, the public will continue to be misinformed, and policy will continue to turn crises into disasters.
Comments
Anne Lambourn, Bracknell, Berkshire / 4:07pm 12 Oct 2006Toby Tennant's letter is excellent. Tragically, the pattern of misdiagnosis was repeated elsewhere in the UK - even in Cumbria, of the 759 "Infected Premises" tested, 85 were found not to have the disease. The tragedy of the wider preemptive killing of 481,000 sheep at Great Orton from an area supposedly "heavily infected" by FMD is underlined by the fact that tests on sheep from 115 farms (5786 sheep) revealed that only one farm had definitely had the disease, with positive tests on only 9 sheep. I understand that these were probably antibody positive results, showing that the sheep had had the disease in the past, but had recovered.
The contiguous and 3 km culling resulted in massive overkill of healthy animals elsewhere - Gloucestershire 326 farms culled, 46 tested but ony 13 had the disease. In the Forest of Dean the culling of contiguous farms was prevented after local protest - timely, as the 34 contiguous farms all returned negative tests.
The real tragedy is that the flawed science on which the contiguous and preemptive culling are based is enshrined in current legislation and disease control policy. If anyone wishes to investigate further, Paul Kitching et al's paper to the OIE entitled "Use and abuse of mathematical models: an illustration from the 2001 FMD disease epidemice in the UK" provides informed comment/investigation. (Dr Kitching was former head of Exotic Diseases at IAH, Pirbright).
What is needed is for disease control policy to be handed back to the veterinary experts in FMD, and for it to be independent of political influence and a centralised non veterinary bureaucracy.
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