When Pigs Go Bad

Bri

tish farmers have endured "mad cow" disease, swine fever and widespread winter floods. Now comes the Fourth Horseman of this agricultural Apocalypse: foot-and-mouth disease. With the added woes of rock-bottom livestock prices and the strong pound hurting exports, farm incomes have plummeted nearly 90% over the last five years, according to accountants Deloitte & Touche. Says Ian Frood, whose beef and sheep farm sits within a quarantine zone just 12 km from the abattoir where Britain's first foot-and-mouth outbreak in two decades was discovered last week: "Things just seem to go from bad to worse."

The initial signs of the highly contagious virus appeared in 27 pigs at the abattoir in Essex, in eastern England, and in several cattle at a nearby farm. Some 300 pigs and 50 cows were quickly slaughtered on both premises, and hundreds of farms around the country that had used the abattoir were placed under restrictions. At week's end it was still unclear how far the disease had spread, but a couple of further outbreaks were reported in Essex, one at a farm some 20 km away. Two others were discovered in the far north of England, including one at a pig-fattening farm in Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland. This farm, also a customer of the Essex slaughterhouse, is now thought to be the source of the outbreak at the abattoir, but how the disease first occurred was unclear. The infection was believed to have been around for anything from 14 to 28 days before it was discovered, giving rise to serious concerns that it may have spread considerably beyond these isolated cases.

That risk is frighteningly high: the virus can be carried by birds, clothes, vehicles, dust, in infected meat eaten by the animal, and in the air itself. As authorities struggled to contain the disease, the public was asked to keep off farmland, livestock movement was halted for a week, markets and abattoirs were closed and fox-hunting was suspended. Those drastic measures brought virtually no complaints anywhere. Memories are still strong of the crippling foot-and-mouth epidemic of 1967, when 440,000 animals were slaughtered, and costs to the industry were $200 million—equivalent to $2.3 billion today.

To address the current crisis, Britain placed a temporary ban on the export of live animals, meat, meat products and milk. The European Union added its own global restrictions of these same British products until at least March 1. "The ban will be devastating for us—it is like staring into the abyss," said National Farmers' Union president Ben Gill. Nonetheless, he admitted, "there is simply no alternative."

It all seemed so dreadfully familiar, like a rerun of the E.U. embargo on British beef during the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis. That ban lasted nearly three and a half years, during which British experts realized that BSE is a threat to people through its brain-wasting human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The beef ban was finally lifted 19 months ago, after a series of draconian measures including the slaughter of all cattle more than 30 months old. Foot-and-mouth disease, a debilitating illness affecting cloven-hoofed animals, rarely affects humans and then usually only mildly.

With BSE, the blame could be put largely on modern, intensive farming methods in Britain and the use—now banned—of feed containing meat and bone meal. Foot-and-mouth disease, on the other hand, is an old scourge. Its last European appearance was in 1994 in Greece, and the condition is endemic in various parts of Africa, Asia and South America. In fact, the l967 outbreak in Britain was eventually traced to frozen lamb imported from Argentina.

While the latest health crisis was more a problem for farmers than for consumers, the disclosure that British meat, once again, has been found tainted by disease was certain to generate public disquiet. Despite the E.U.'s all-clear in mid-1999, Britain still has difficulty selling its beef in Europe—now in the grip of its own "mad cow" panic. The latest ban on all British meat will reduce the country's exports by around $11.4 million a week. That will be only part of the price paid by an industry battling to restore its image amid disasters of Biblical proportions.