Slaughterhouse

Jam

es McInnes is going broke. The 45 hectares of sprawling pasture he owns in the southwestern English county of Devon lie fallow, its 70 head of cattle close to worthless. He can't find a buyer for the ancestral farm, which he is now desperate to sell. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease has turned the verdant countryside into a gruesome field of slaughter. The prevailing sound is the crack of pistol shots felling livestock. Farms appear barren save for the smoldering pyres on which hundreds of perfectly healthy animals were incinerated last week. So far McInnes' herd has avoided infection, which means he still has a chance to unload the farm and "pack up and leave." But he can't move—his land has been quarantined, leaving him little to do but despair. "I wake up every morning wondering whether the wind has blown this devilish disease to my cows," he says. "You can only imagine the state of anguish I'm in."

He's among the lucky ones. Foot-and-mouth disease, a centuries-old malady, continued its resurgence last week—rampaging through British farms, paralyzing the country's rural economy, draining public coffers and setting off yet another health panic in Europe. It even prompted soul-searching about the future of European agriculture and the safety of European food in an increasingly competitive, and hazardous, global marketplace. But the epidemic's most devastating impact was felt in picturesque English counties like Devon and Northumberland, by scores of businessmen even less fortunate than McInnes: despondent small farmers who watched entire livelihoods go up in smoke with the remains of their condemned animals. "It's a killer," sighs McInnes. The National Farmers' Union estimates the crisis costs farmers $30 million a week. "We're just waiting and praying," says Ian Johnson, an N.F.U. official in Devon. "This is our worst nightmare."

No one knew when it might end. By Saturday, more than 50 incidents of foot-and-mouth in the U.K. had turned up—from Dover on the southeastern tip to Lockerbie in Scotland—and fresh cases were expected at the rate of six to 10 a day. The confirmation of a suspected case on a farm in south Armagh, Northern Ireland, just inside the border with the Republic of Ireland, raised fears that it had seeped beyond British borders; on Friday the Irish government dispatched army troops to the border to prevent animals from crossing the boundary. The threat of the plague bounding onto the Continent whipped other European countries, newly roused by their recent battles against bovine spongiform encephalopathy (bse), into a paranoid frenzy. Border inspectors examined everything from car tires to ham sandwiches for traces of foot-and-mouth. Tourists from the U.K. were ordered to disinfect their feet upon arrival in Portugal. Possible symptoms of the disease were reported in Belgium. Although initial tests for the virus on a pig farm near the town of Diksmuide were negative, all 323 pigs—75 of them British imports—were destroyed and transportation of live farm animals was banned. Germany ordered the slaughter of all sheep, goats and deer imported from the U.K. since Feb. 1. France decreed that 50,000 sheep be destroyed—at least twice as many as the number of animals culled in Britain itself. European Muslims prepared to celebrate the festival of Eid al Adha without its main ritual, the sacrifice of sheep. In distant Thailand, officials even threatened to jail travelers caught bringing in beef or pork from any of the 15 European Union countries. And on Friday came more doleful news there will be no St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin this year.

At times the public and the press were in danger of losing perspective. Few officials in Britain, for instance, were raising their voices to remind people that the current scourge so far is a minor nuisance compared to the country's last big outbreak in 1967, which took five months to control and led to the killing of 440,000 animals. Or that foot-and-mouth disease, unlike bse, poses no serious danger to humans and isn't fatal even to animals. Or that the epidemic's overall economic impact would likely remain limited: agriculture comprises such a small slice of modern economies that a month-long outbreak in the U.K. would slow this year's growth by just .05%.

Officials in britain were too busy acting decisively to dwell on such details. Many rural schools were closed and national parks cordoned off. The transporting of livestock was banned, which meant butcher shops had trouble finding meat to sell—and prices soared by up to 50% for what they could locate. Horse racing was suspended for seven days. The Labour government moved quickly to assuage rural misery in what will probably be an election year, picking up the entire tab for all slaughtered animals and offering a further $225 million in compensation to farmers. On Friday the government relaxed the ban on livestock movement to allow animals licensed as disease-free to be transported directly to slaughterhouses. But Labour could be hit by the fallout too. There was the possibility, albeit remote, that travel restrictions would force the postponement until the fall of the general election widely expected to be called for May.

As anxieties about the plague spread throughout Europe, so did the recriminations. The Spanish daily El Mundo blasted Britain for its "excess confidence" that the country could prevent outbreaks of foot-and-mouth without vaccinating livestock, something most E.U. governments did until a decade ago. Continental farmers grumbled that Britain, where the bse scare began, was once again exporting a food crisis to the rest of Europe. English farmers pinned blame for the epidemic on meat products imported from non-E.U. countries. Environmentalists denounced the drive toward intensified, low-cost farming as the culprit. And in Brussels, bureaucrats were warning that they couldn't afford another crisis: the E.U. has already spent $1 billion to bail out farmers suffering from the bse-induced plunge in beef consumption. "If [foot-and-mouth] does spread to the Continent," says Commission spokesman Luc Veron, "the money would be gone before we could write a check."

How did Europe get into this fix? British veterinary investigators last week zeroed in on Burnside farm, a pig-fattening facility in Northumberland, in the north of England. Vets believe pigs at the unit may have been fed leftovers from local school lunches that possibly contained bits of contaminated meat. The current virus, experts say, is the pan-Asian variant of the "O" type of foot-and-mouth, a highly infectious strain, which could have entered Britain through illegally imported meat. Once the virus got into the pig swill at Burnside, it was too late. A group of pigs from the farm ended up at a slaughterhouse in Essex, where the disease was first spotted on Feb. 20. Meanwhile, sheep and cattle at a farm near Burnside soon became infected from the airborne virus; some of the sheep were then sent to the nearby Hexham Market, where they mixed with other livestock and immediately passed the virus on. "Pigs spread it, sheep carry it, cattle show it," says Johnson. William Cleave, a large cattle dealer from Devon, unwittingly purchased a flock of diseased sheep at the market and took the animals to another market in Cumbria, before sending them to a farm in Highampton, 700 km away.