Trouble on the Hoof: Disease Outbreaks in Europe

Trouble on the Hoof: Disease Outbreaks in Europe
▪ 2002
by Brian J. Ford
      Farmers rarely celebrate good fortune in the modern world, but British agriculture seemed to be emerging from a period of darkness as 2001 began. The scourge of “mad cow” disease was in retreat.

      After mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE]) had first been causally related to a human brain illness in March 1996, British beef farming had plunged into crisis. It was evident that eating infected beef in Great Britain had led to a newly recognized fatal illness in humans, initially dubbed new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) and later shortened to variant CJD (vCJD).

      Sufferers of vCJD have an average age of around 30. When stricken, they become depressed and apprehensive, and they suffer delusions of being attacked and persecuted by others. They lose the ability to walk and howl like animals as they wither. No cure has been found and little treatment is available.

      The causative agent of vCJD is a prion, a form of infectious protein devoid of any genetic material, that causes malformation of brain cells. There are other theories, including one that posits that organophosphate pesticides have given rise to vCJD, but these pesticides are in use elsewhere around the world, and yet vCJD is confined to Britain. Only in the U.K. has the processing of animal feed dramatically changed. Since the early 1980s lower processing temperatures have been authorized, and it is claimed that this allows infectious prions to spread. The incidence of vCJD in Britons rose to a total of about 90 cases at the start of 2001, but it was still showing no signs of the widely forecast dramatic increase. The prions seemed, to humans, to be mercifully uninfectious.

      The annual cases of BSE in British cattle rose from 447 by the end of 1987 to 37,280 in 1992. From that date the incidencefell until by the start of 2001 the annual figure was down to 1,537 cases. The figure continued to fall. In the final week of March—five years since the link between BSE and disease in humans had been announced—there were only five new cases of BSE reported. By June, however, the unthinkable had happened: there were 214 new cases of BSE in Britain, while mainland Europe, which had remained largely free of BSE and had placed severe restrictions on the UK meat producers ever since the epidemic emerged, now had more confirmed cases—313—than the UK.

      In the meantime, the hopes prevailing early in the year had already been dashed by a devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (also known as hoof-and-mouth disease in the U.S.). According to the Northumberland (Eng.) County Council, a farmer had been illegally feeding unprocessed kitchen waste to his pigs. Among the scraps was meat from a restaurant that had illicitly imported supplies of produce from East Asia, and some of this was infected with the virus.

      Council officials who were prosecuting the farmer stated that he had noticed symptoms among his pigs but did not report them. As his animals were moved from farm to marketplace, the virus spread, and within weeks Britain was in the throes of the outbreak. British agriculture was crippled once again.

      A government ban on the movement of livestock meant that newborn lambs were left to die in the wet mud of open ground instead of being returned to the warmth and safety of the lambing shed. Slaughtermen at infected farms killed all the animals they found. Thousands of decomposing carcasses were left piled high in farmyards. In July the government canceled the sterilization of infected farms because of the high cost involved. A ban on exports meant that British farmers once more had no access to the open market.

      Foot-and-mouth disease had last caused a major outbreak in the U.S. in 1929. It was one of the illnesses most feared by farmers. Infected animals dribble saliva and develop sores on hooves and around the mouth. Curiously, the disease is rarely fatal. Tropical animals carry the virus as a matter of course, and in water buffaloes it produces few effects. The worldwide extent of the virus means that there will be no end to it in the foreseeable future.

      For months the story was featured in the media, but eventually the press coverage diminished. Many people imagined that the disease outbreak had been controlled, yet figures from the U.K.'s new Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—which replaced the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food following the British general election in June 2001—showed that there were between three and five new outbreaks in some parts of the U.K. every day. Among those were 12 new cases in Cumbria and 17 in Yorkshire.

      In July sheep grazing free on the Brecon Beacons in Wales were corralled together and tested for the virus; 10% of them showed positive results. The rural affairs minister for Wales, Carwyn Jones, announced that the unfenced sheep would be slaughtered. The survival of the British landscape depends on grazing animals. From the sweeping grandeur of the Lake District to the rugged headlands of Cornwall and the wild Welsh hills, grazing sheep and cattle are the principal agents of land management.

      By midyear almost five million animals had been slaughtered. Stories circulated of farmers' buying infected sheep in order to claim compensation. Fears of a resurgence in the fall, when animals were brought down from the hills, proved to be unfounded, and by mid-January 2002 the British farm herds were declared officially free of infection.

      Nations around the world adopted antivirus measures, with disinfecting hand washes and shoe mats imposed upon tourists. Most governments in areas normally free from the virus relied on a policy of slaughtering infected herds whenever there was an outbreak. This method worked when outbreaks were rare, but many observers expected that the practice of vaccination might become necessary in the future. Meanwhile, the global reach of the Internet has given people the chance to import exotic meats from around the world—free of import restrictions and usually falsely labeled. This fact leads to speculation that local diseases could become global epidemics in the new millennium.

      The effect of foot-and-mouth disease on tourism is severe, despite the fact that there are very few cases of the disease infecting people, and the human illness is fleeting and mild. The tourism industry has lost millions, and for all the promises of financial assistance offered by the British government, little benefit was reported by rural communities themselves. Some apparently unrelated businesses also face extinction. Hot-air balloon companies, for example, have been unable to operate, and thousands of employees have been laid off. The Institute of Directors claimed that the total cost of the epidemic would be £20 billion (about $30 billion).

      Nearing year's end, the number of victims of vCJD rose beyond 100. They were not the only people to die. After watching in utter despair as their livestock were shot, more than 100 British farmers turned their shotguns on themselves.

Brian J. Ford is a biologist and the author of many books, including BSE: The Facts (1996) and The Future of Food (2000).

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