Fresh outbreaks of food-and-mouth disease on Thursday showed that Britain's battle with the livestock disease is not over yet. New cases in Somerset and Devon, in an area which had not previously been hit by the disease, worried experts. Army units were recalled to battle the outbreak. "Numbers of daily cases are dramatically down but we take very seriously the disease situation which remains in certain areas," said Margaret Beckett, appointed last week to head the newly created Ministry for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Even though the government announced last month that it had won its battle with the disease, experts now fear that the outbreak could continue until the end of the year. "If the contiguous cull has gone well, if all the other culling has gone well, then one should find only a very limited number of flocks affected," independent veterinary expert Tony Andrews told BBC radio."If this is not the case this looks very bad for the future." Anthony Gibson, regional director for the National Farmers' Union, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the government would need to have a contingency plan for vaccination. "Everyone's been clinging to the epidemiologists' predictions that it would fade away during the summer and that we were winning. If the slaughter policy is not going to work- and that's the way it's looking frankly-then we've got to move to plan B," Gibson said. .The disease spread rapidly across Britain, leading to the slaughter of more than three million animals and the loss of meat export markets and tourism revenues. Source: Reuters
