On 19 February 2001 the world turned upside down. The first case of foot and mouth (FMD) disease was notified. The nightmare lasted until 14 January 2002 when the country was declared formally free of the disease. So almost twenty-five years ago.
And of course with the twenty-fifth anniversary coming up, people have asked how, or even whether, it should be remembered. I remember ten years after the outbreak, people wondered about ‘doing something’ and the farming community just blanked it. We’d lived through it, we didn’t want the recorded highlights.
Looking back, in the very south of Cumbria, we were surrounded by the disease, backed against the sea with the infected area cutting us off. Somebody from the north of the county commented about us, “They also went through hell, but had to fill in the paperwork both ways.”
Looking back, I’m left with a series of images, vignettes: Perhaps these will give people a better feel for it?
When we were allowed (after filling in a mound of paperwork) to move cattle along a road between our fields, we had to disinfect the road. A single track lane. I can still remember my wife and my mother, bundled up like a pair of Russian peasant women against a bitter wind in March, scrubbing the road. We had one chap in a car come hammering through and he screeched to a halt because the tractor was blocking the road. He started shouting at us to get out of the way. I walked across, told him that he’d driven over the road we hadn’t yet disinfected, so I was going to phone the police to see if they wanted his car disinfected. You’ve never seen anybody reverse so fast down a narrow lane, and he disappeared, never to be seen again.
Or as FMD drew closer, less than fifteen miles as the crow flies, we had to face up to other things. Oldest daughter was living in town, so we had to discuss with her what happened if we were locked down with FMD. We’d phone her and she’d have to come out of work to collect youngest daughter from school and take her back to live with her.
Then there were the guinea pigs. Guinea pigs can get FMD. So if we were shot out, they too would have to go. So at what point do you explain this to a small girl?
And all through this we were told it was all under control, and Tony Blair wanted it over and done with so he could have a general election.
I think it was when, in March 2001, he flew to Stockholm for a European summit. When he landed, Swedish officials insisted on seizing and destroying food supplies from his aircraft. At that point he may have realised that some states take biosecurity seriously.
Then there was the bureaucracy, the utter inability to cope. We had a scare. A cow was limping a bit and drooling. So I phoned our vet and they phoned Carlisle. A Ministry vet appeared. The first thing he did was park his car across our drive. Nothing could come in or go out until he’d worked out whether we had a case or not. If we had a case, nothing would come in or out. At least not alive.
We were automatically on a movement restriction. So then he looked at the cow. He had with him a young Spanish vet, she was being ‘familiarised’ with the disease so she could go out on her own. They examined the cow as I kept it quiet. It was fascinating watching one vet explaining everything to their junior, running through all the checks she would soon have to do on her own. But now, it was something entirely different and minor. Not a problem.
But the vet phoned MAFF in London to tell them it wasn’t FMD. Then two vets, a desperately needed, vital resource, then had to sit in our kitchen for four hours before some bureaucrat in London decided that their diagnosis was correct and the movement restriction was lifted and they could get on with combating the outbreak.
Why? Why does some clerk in a London office have to give permission to an experienced Vet who had examined the animal in question? Why does it take four hours?
A couple of years later I met the vet again, of all places it was on a train. He was thinking of changing careers, there was too much grief. A year or two after that I heard he’d killed himself. It wasn’t just farmers who suffered trauma.
And then finally Blair turned up in Cumbria. Enough people met him to show him what a shambles (in some cases literally) the situation was.
At that point he brought in the army. Without them, God alone knows how long it would have taken the UK to get the disease under control. I know one farm where they’d struggled for years with a bad bend on the lane leading to the farm. They couldn’t get any sort of lorry past it. Nothing could be done about it because there was a house with a garden on the bend and it was their wall constricting traffic. The owner wouldn’t do anything about the wall.
When the farm were shot out, the army appeared, and explained, nicely, that his wall was going because otherwise they couldn’t get a lorry up to remove the corpses. This wasn’t a request, the digger was being unloaded from the trailer as the sergeant explained the situation.
Oh yes. And when things started to calm down, my lady wife decided that she would take youngest daughter to London. Youngest daughter had never been. And it was totally not rural, no risk of bringing infection back. So they went down there for a week or so.
And one day they would visit London Zoo. As they went to get a ticket, they were asked where they were from.
“Cumbria.”
“Have you been on a farm in the last six months?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry but you cannot come in.”
So why do we want, twenty-five years on? Politicians to take biosecurity seriously, no more meat carried through airports in back packs and suitcases.
It will happen again, so it would be nice to thing they read the report from the last two times, and take on board their recommendations.
It will happen again. It’s happened four times in my lifetime, it will happen again.