How Foot and Mouth Figures Decline in Time for the Election

There is evidence that the Government is falsifying the foot and mouth figures to create the impression that the epidemic will be over by the time of a June election. The authority of two leading scientists - without any veterinary background - is being used to make MPs believe that their slaughter policy has been so successful that the number of cases will soon drop to nil. The MPs were shown a graph where the number of predicted cases were dropping to zero on exactly June 7. However, these results are all but meaningless, said Dr. Paul Kitching, one of the Government's most senior experts of the Pirbright Animal Health Institute. At least four techniques are being used to ensure that the curve of daily 'cases' is heading sharply downwards, so that the earlier rate of as many as 44 new reported outbreaks a day had dropped last week to as few as six.

Hundreds of farms that would previously have been included in the Maff's daily outbreak figure are now being reclassified as 'slaughter on suspicion' or 'dangerous contacts' and thus no longer appear in the statistics.

Mr. Brown also confirmed that Maff is no longer testing for FMD in victims of its huge 'contiguous cull', under which it has slaughtered all animals on 5,000 farms that fell within a designated 'three-kilometre zone' around an infected holding. Since many of these animals may be infected, the decision to stop testing means that they too are no longer added to the figures.

There are persistent reports that infected farms are simply not appearing on the Maff website. On a day when Cumbrian farmers counted no fewer than 24 holdings that had been declared infected in their county alone, Maff reported only nine new cases in the whole county.

However, the most alarming policy switch of all appears to be Maff's new reluctance to confirm genuine cases of foot and mouth even when local vets are adamant that animals have the disease.

Dr. Kitching, who was struck by how, when the prospective election date was changed from May to June, the projections seemed to adjust accordingly, has now announced that he is resigning to take up a new post in Canada.

Having rejected vaccination it seems Blair's advisers are now falling back on fiddling the figures.

Source: The Sunday Telegraph, 29 April 2001