Slaughtering for Safety

The Smithfield Show, Britain's largest agricultural exhibition, is normally a roistering barnyard symphony of bleats, moos and grunts. But this year virtually the only sound to be heard in the show grounds at London's cavernous Earl's Court was the occasional roar of a tractor. For the first time in memory not a single animal was competing for the Smithfield's blue ribbons. The reason: one of the most virulent outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in modern British history.

Borne by the Wind. Though foot-and-mouth disease is rarely fatal--most animals recover after two or three weeks of painful blisters on the hoof, tongue and inside of the mouth--it strikes fiercely at dairy cattle, sharply reducing their milk production and afflicting them with sterility, heart trouble and chronic lameness. Produced by a virus, the disease is rampantly contagious, can be carried by humans (who very rarely contract it), birds, wild animals, frozen meat and even the wind. To combat its dread effects, Britain's Ministry of Agriculture has adopted a Draconian policy: the slaughter of an entire herd if even one animal has been stricken. Since the current outbreak began in early November, Ministry of Agriculture officers have killed 42,000 cattle, sheep and pigs, paid out $2,800,000 in compensation to farmers.

Whenever a single animal comes down with foot-and-mouth, the farm on which it lives and all the surrounding territory in a 15-mile radius are declared "infected areas." At the height of this year's outbreak, most of Scotland was posted and only two English counties north of London were out of quarantine. Even sportsmen and gourmets were affected: fox hunting was banned in certain areas, racing pigeons could not be transported to and from Northern Ireland, and wild stag --a favorite seasonal dish--was swept from table. From Dorset to Angus, husbandmen feverishly telephoned neighbors to discover if a new outbreak had occurred, isolated themselves from visitors for fear the virus would be tracked in.

Of Mice & Muscles. As losses mounted, farmers, Members of Parliament and editorial writers began to ask if it was still necessary for Britain to stamp out animals along with the disease. Sympathetic to their pleas, the British government is spending nearly $1,000,000 a year on foot-and-mouth research at laboratories in Pirbright. Surrey, has already developed one promising immunization technique similar to live polio virus inoculations: an attenuated live foot-and-mouth virus is grown in a culture of kidney tissues, then injected into chick embryos, mice, and finally into the muscles of animals where it multiplies harmlessly, stimulating the production of antibodies.

So far, however, field trials of the Pirbright vaccine have been limited to South Africa, Kenya and Tanganyika, and until a surefire vaccine is discovered, the British government sees no alternative to mass slaughter of infected herds. Chief reason is that to do otherwise would end Britain's profitable exports of breeding stock to Canada and the U.S., both of which refuse to admit cattle from areas where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic and controlled only by immunization. This was a precaution Britain could well understand, since the most likely cause of Britain's own current troubles was frozen meat from Argentina--where the policy is vaccination, not slaughter.

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