"contiguous cull" strategy = instead of vaccinating in rings around infected foci as advocated by such as the world expert Professor Fred Brown, the mathematical model advised a smaller "ring" (3 km) of 'depopulation' around confirmed outbreaks. In other words, a mass killing of all farm animals and pets susceptible to foot and mouth who happened to be found within a three kilometre radius of any suspected outbreak. Pleas for sheep to be blood tested rather than slaughtered indiscriminately were rejected.In the Veterinary Record of May 12 2001, the scientific paper "Relative risks of the uncontrollable (airborne) spread of FMD by different species" by Alex Donaldson et al made it clear that this overkill was unnecessary. "..... 2001 simulations predict that it would require 100 cattle or sheep to be infected at source for an infectious dose to travel a distance of 0.2 km and be sufficient to infect cattle. In the FMD situation in the UK, the level of clinical surveillance is such that it is unlikely that the number of infected cases in a cattle herd would be as high as 100.Furthermore,the emerging serological evidence suggests that infection has progressed slowly through sheep flocks during the UK epidemic and so there is a low probability that 100 sheep would be in the early acute phase of infection or clinical disease, simultaneously (R.P.Kitching, unpublished observations)...." (See "Relative risks of the uncontrollable (airborne) spread of FMD by different species" )
"chaotic and unmanageable slaughter which resulted in so much human distress" (Dr Maggie Mort, Lancaster university, to the Inquiry Team)Beware flawed mathematical models and over-ambitious modellersAs ProMed moderator Martin Hugh Jones remarked:"I have a phrase I use on my students and those over-enamored of their computers and models, "Why should I believe you when you have a computer pallor and no mud on your shoes?" The truth is in the field, not in the computer. When models are checked and rechecked against reality they can be fine-tuned and may eventually become useful....Some fall in love with their models but you should never marry them. And the truth is in the field." http://www.warmwell.com/july17promed.htmlThe so-called "contiguous cull" was illegal http://www.warmwell.com/legalitymenu2.html- and it was untried, untested and the result of flawed modelling. The professor of epidemiology who produced and urged the mass slaughter policy ( on a government bewildered and desperate for a quick fix before the election) is brilliant, charismatic and very persuasive. In 2001 he was also mistaken.On Newsnight on March 21 2001, ( http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/fmd/fmd_report/documents/E-MediaTranscripts/Newsnight%20Anderson.210301.pdfSusan Watts in the course of her interview with him, said that Prof Anderson's "projection suggests the infection is not going to peak for many weeks to come" - and yet in fact, as Kitching later wrote, http://www.warmwell.com/kitchingonmodelling.html"It is noteworthy to identify that the peak of the epidemic was on 27th March, and with a 5-day incubation period the epidemic was under control by 22nd March: this preceded the introduction of rapid (suspected) IP culling as well as pre-emptive culling (of DCs and CPs...)". Prof Anderson, in that Newsnight interview, said "If this cull is applied vigorously and effectively enough you could turn the epidemic in to a decaying process hopefully within you know, a month to two months." A "decaying process" indeed.Later test results http://www.iah.ac.uk/press_release/2006/FMD%20tests%20sep06.htmshowed that 23% of farms diagnosed as having foot-and-mouth disease were uninfected - but by then, of course, the farms in a three kilometre radius had also been "slaughtered out". So, healthy or not, pregnant or not, new born or not - animals were slaughtered in their millions, often in haste and without compassion. Included in this list of uninfected animals were priceless breeding stock, entire blood lines (eg Colin Stokes' old English flock, that had just successfully lambed, made extinct by total culling), and children's pets.If there was, as some suspected, a hidden agenda to cut livestock numbers dramatically in the UK, the policy worked - but at something of a cost. The mathematical model urged by Prof Anderson put paid in 2001 to ten million http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1382356/10-million-animals-were-slaughtered-in-foot-and-mouth-cull.htmlanimals and their young during Britain's Foot and Mouth crisis The vast majority of them were healthy. The social and psychological effects have been well documented by a study (Dr. Maggie Mort at Lancaster University et al) concluding that FMD 2001 was a human tragedy as much as an animal disease. Dr Mort's letter to the Inquiry Team 2002 http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/fmd/fmd_report/documents/a-submissions/Ref%20415.pdfspoke of, "severe and widespread trauma from which recovery is problematic. Psychologically these effects range from unresolved loss and bereavement to enduring signs of post traumatic stress including nightmares" Interestingly she also wrote, "In addition, from personal and professional observation, I believe that a programme of ‘vaccination and cull’, would have avoided the chaotic and unmanageable slaughter which resulted in so much human distress in addition to the animal distress." For farmers and vets in the field it certainly was - and a financial burden to the country of a conservatively estimated 9 billion pounds http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/fmd/attachments/Okehampton%20transcript.docSomehow, the scandal never broke. Honours were heaped upon the major players and very little reached the public through the mainstream media of the suicides, deep distress and terrible losses that the policy brought in its wake.Some Bullet Points...
- Those models - produced at Imperial College and approved by Professor Sir Roy Anderson and Professor Mark Woolhouse - were badly flawed because they relied on computers rather than advice from vets and virologists who understood the nature of the disease. "No model will produce the right output when fed the wrong input,"....There are vital lessons here about how we should control future outbreaks, avoiding the horrendous cost and slaughter of the last. Thus far, there is no sign that those lessons have been learnt. " Magnus Linklater The Times 11/10/06 http://www.warmwell.com/06oct10magnus.html
- "It suggests they were making it up as they went along..."
Peter Ainsworth, then Tory shadow agriculture spokesman, on Dr David Shannon's criticisms of the Science Advisory Group http://www.warmwell.com/shannonfeb19.html
"It suggests they were making it up as they went along, that they were insufficiently broad-based and that there was a faint whiff of chaos about it."
- Anderson's team modelled a hypothetical "species" with assumed levels of susceptibility to airborne transmission, neither of which had any basis in veterinary science. http://www.warmwell.com/andersongroup.html
Alan Beat wrote http://www.warmwell.com/profmythnv2.htm
The computer modelling team from Imperial College, headed by Professor Roy Anderson, has led government policy throughout the foot and mouth disease (FMD) epidemic. It was their analysis that proposed the greatly increased slaughter of the contiguous cull, and warned that anything less would allow the epidemic to spiral right out of control, with the eventual loss of half the total UK livestock population. On 11th May, a paper detailing this work was published in "Science" magazine. Five months later, on 4th October, a second paper was published in "Nature" magazine, updating their work and claiming to justify their earlier predictions....
....The May paper states "We did not differentiate between host species but instead used a time-varying infection-to-report distribution averaged over species." However, by October the Imperial team are saying " Farm susceptibility and infectiousness both varied significantly, with smaller farms being substantially less infectious and less susceptible than larger ones. Stratifying farms by the most prevalent species revealed a trend for cattle farms to be more susceptible, and pig farms to be least susceptible."
This, of course, is precisely what veterinary scientists had been saying all along, but it was completely ignored in the earlier modelling work. In fact, Professor Alex Donaldson of Pirbright laboratory has shown that there is wide variation between the livestock species in their capacity to catch and to transmit the disease; while the current strain of FMD virus is extremely unlikely to spread by windborne means from a source farm to its contiguous neighbours in most practical situations, whatever the livestock species involved. So here again, the conclusion is clear - that the original input data to the computer modelling programme were completely wrong.....Those of us who actually experienced the holocaust of mass slaughter have seen for ourselves the inconsistencies between official control policy and reality. Farms with cattle were seen to be infected far more often than sheep holdings, yet sheep were blamed throughout for the spread of disease (a claim now being disproved by widespread blood testing). Most contiguous farms that were slaughtered tested negative for disease; and of those that refused the cull, none that I know of went on to develop disease.
"....It is of course precisely because killing healthy animals is still a criminal offence that the Government is introducing its Animal Health Bill, due for its Lords second reading on Tuesday. This will give Defra the unprecedented power to kill any animal it wants, without having to give reason and taking away from farmers any legal right to protest. It was doubtless in anticipation of trouble from angry peers that Anderson's team last week published a paper in Nature, claiming that, if BSE is found in sheep, this could lead to 150,000 deaths from CJD. This is so wonderfully dotty one scarcely knows where to begin. There is no shred of evidence any sheep has ever suffered from BSE or is likely to. And there is still no evidence, despite the efforts of well-funded scientists, that BSE causes CJD (the incidence of which is now falling just when, if there were any link, it should be rising).
Yet on the basis of this mad double hypothesis, the Anderson team produces a paper which is endorsed by Prof Sir John Krebs, Fellow of the Royal Society and head of the Food Standards Agency, and Prof Robert May FRS, Mr Blair's former Chief Scientist. It was May who recommended as his successor Prof David King FRS, who in turn, on Krebs's recommendation, appointed Prof Anderson FRS as chief policy advisor on foot-and-mouth. Krebs, May and Anderson all worked together at the Oxford University Zoology Department, which also employs Professor Sir Brian Follett FRS, who also just happens to have been picked by the Royal Society to chair Mr Blair's inquiry into the scientific handling of foot-and-mouth. Put all these connections together and it may be seen why we are never going to get an independent public inquiry into last year's foot-and-mouth disaster. .."
The story behind
Professor Anderson's move to Imperial College began in January 1999, when he was
suspended on full pay from his chair in zoology while the university authorities
investigated complaints filed by his colleague Dr Sunetra Gupta. He had accused
her, publicly and falsely, of gaining her post at Oxford by sleeping with
another professor in the zoology department. Two months later Anderson was
reinstated, after agreeing to apologise in writing to those concerned. This
failed to satisfy Dr Gupta, who continued to press for a public retraction. A
meeting attended by 26 readers, lecturers and professors in the zoology
department passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in Professor Anderson.
Meanwhile, an inquiry by the university into the research centre in the
zoology department criticised his 'autocratic' management style: conditions at
the centre were 'intolerable' and divisions ran 'very deep'.
A separate
financial audit then found that Anderson had not disclosed either to the
university or the Wellcome Trust, which largely financed his research centre,
that he was a director and shareholder of International Biomedical and Health
Sciences Consortium, a private consultancy firm which had close financial links
with the centre. As director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology
of Infectious Diseases, he had applied for over £4 million of research grants
from Wellcome, while also being a Trustee of the Wellcome Trust itself, which
awarded the grants. 'There was a degree of naivety on his part', a Wellcome
spokesman said. 'He should have been aware of the procedures to be
followed. The research centre was also receiving commercial grants
which were not declared, in breach of the trust's
regulations'.
On 9 May
2000, Anderson resigned his Oxford professorship and announced that he was
taking up a chair at Imperial College. A month later, he finally gave Dr Gupta
the formal apology she wanted, admitting that there had been 'no foundation in
truth whatsoever' in his comments. He paid her legal costs plus damages of
#l,000, which she donated to Save the Children. As she told the Daily
Telegraph in June: "I felt nobody should be allowed to get away with this
and remain in a position where they are making judgements about people's
lives... I felt there was no other choice, no other way to protect myself or
other people'.
Anderson also resigned from his seat on the Board of Trustees for the Wellcome Trust. His departure was announced by Wellcome on 11 March 2000 in somewhat opaque terms, stating that, 'in view of recent events at the University of Oxford', his resignation 'would be in the best interests of both the Trust and himself'.
..and later...FSA's previous record in grasping the realities of which foodstuffs are actually dangerous or not. This was the organisation which some years back tried to close down a whole industry,employing 2,000 people making sausage skins out of lamb's intestines, because it was terrified that sheep might catch BSE. The FSA had been told this by Defra and Professor Roy Anderson, after Defra's testing of sheep's brains had shown clear signs of BSE vacuoles. They then discovered that the brains they had been inspecting came from cows and not sheep after all. (Muckspreader Private Eye April 7 2007)