Nothing But Lies

Delay Let Virus Out of Control

Delays between the diagnosis of foot-and-mouth disease and the slaughter of infected animals have been crucial to the spread of the virus, two scientific advisers to the Government said.
The present outbreak had proved impossible to contain because it had taken an average of two to three days to organise the slaughter of infected herds, according to Mark Woolhouse, of the University of Edinburgh, and Alex Donaldson, head of the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright, Surrey.
Such a long interval between diagnosis and slaughter had given the virus unnecessary opportunities to infect nearby herds, and had contributed greatly to the course and extent of the outbreak, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature. By contrast, during an outbreak in Denmark in 1982, infected herds were slaughtered an average of 15 hours after they were confirmed with the virus. As a result, the epidemic was contained after just 22 cases.
Another major problem has been that many infected animals, particularly sheep, had not been found to have the disease because symptoms had been missed, the researchers said. That had led to further delays in the slaughter of livestock that could transmit the virus and underlined the need for a new diagnostic test for the disease.
‘A research priority is to develop a cheap, rapid pen-side diagnostic test for detecting FMD virus in the absence of clinical signs,’ the two scientists said.
Since movement controls were imposed on livestock on February 23, transmission of the disease has been confined almost completely to local spread over short distances, leading to the clusters that have been seen in Cumbria and Devon.
The outbreak, however, remained ‘out of control’ because each new case was causing an average of more than one subsequent outbreak. Only once that ratio was reversed, so that each case produced less than one new case, could the disease be said to be contained.