Nothing But Lies

Help of Veterinarians Not Wanted

Downing Street and the Ministry of Agriculture came to loggerheads over the handling of foot-and-mouth, which hampered the urgent search for vets to deal with the epidemic.
The Prime Minister told the House of Commons that vets were being recruited ‘from whatever source we possibly can’. But as No 10 was asking for assistance from vets worldwide, MAFF officials – in the regions and in Whitehall – were claiming that no extra help was needed.
Keith Baker, a past president of the British Veterinary Association, said: ‘Ministers are saying we need more [vets] but some of the messages, both from the ground and from MAFF centrally, are that they have enough. It’s extraordinary. We have been trying to get an answer from MAFF today but they have not come back to us.’
William Hague, the Conservative leader, highlighted the case of a retired vet with 40 years’ MAFF experience who had volunteered to help but was still waiting to hear if he was wanted.
Downing Street also suggested that previous sheep movement figures supplied by MAFF had massively underestimated the likely scale of the epidemic.
Mr Blair said two weeks before that there had been 2,000 ‘sheep movements’ in the period between the disease taking hold and it being detected. But that figure severely understated the number because a ‘movement’ could often be a large truckload. The total number of sheep moved was 1.35 million either for export, to abattoirs or markets. ‘If this disease was incubating then, clearly it has been far more widespread than hitherto thought’, Mr Blair told MPs.
Mr Blair apparently demanded to know the figures after taking full charge of efforts to combat the disease. They were supplied to him a week later.
Government officials suggested privately that the figures were the latest evidence of how the ministry had underestimated the problem. Mr Blair had been voicing exasperation to colleagues about the ministry.
But it is the scarcity of vets which continues to impede efforts. Nick Brown, Minister for Agriculture, has described the shortage as ‘probably the single largest problem’ as MAFF seeks to bring the virus under control by cutting to 24 hours the time between the first report of a case and the slaughter of infected livestock.
MAFF has only 220 field vets in its state veterinary service, compared to the 417 during the outbreak in 1967. Ninety vets have been recruited overseas. More than 800 of the new recruits, however, have come from private practice in Britain.
In the five weeks since the first outbreak, the number of vets available to tackle the disease — recruited from private practice and from abroad — has risen from 421 to 1,269.