UKH

Possible Foot and Mouth disease at Feltwell, near Kings Lynn....

We don't need more epidemics (let alone pandemics).

Welcome to the Pandemic Age. With the way we have structured our food industry and our incessant 'need' for meat almost every day of the week it's just waiting for the next big one - which  could make Covid look like a common cold. 

God forbid bacteria find a way around the last few antibiotics we have left, that's going to be fun. Also partly thanks to the meat-industrial complex. 

I live in Holland and we currently have a big problem with nitrogen and methane depositions mostly caused by industrial-scale cattle farming pretty much making all other economic activity impossible due to environmental consequences and European agreements. I get that it sucks to be a farmer in such times but the arguments raised by the agricultural lobby are mind-numbing at times. Cows (and to a lesser extend other cattle) are notoriously inefficient when it comes to calorie production and they still have the audacity to claim that they are feeding the world. They are completely locked in to an economy of scale that's no longer sustainable. It's the worst when they claim that nitrogen deposition is a good thing because plants need nitrogen to grow. Yes, to a certain extent that's true but it's like telling someone they can become healthy on MacDonalds because the body needs fat, sugar and salt to survive. 

In all honesty I'm not vegan or even fully vegetarian put we have been drastically cutting back our meat consumption over the last few years and it's much easier than I originally thought it would be. As a species, we have to do the same in order to keep our world liveable and stand a fighting chance to evade the next zoonotic pandemic. 

I saw that APHA alert this morning too and my heart sank. Let's hope its not proven or quickly contained. The 2001 outbreak remains clear in my memory 20 years on. I hope the mass of modelling and criticism then leads to a fast and appropriate response.

Don’t forget the potential polio in London.

Same family of viruses. Essentially you need to smash indivdual virions with a hammer* to get rid of them, normal disinfection with alcohol does nothing at all....

* glutaraldehyde will do

More seriously, I am glad that someone is at least doing diligent environmental sampling and picks up something like this ! Live polio vaccine is bad because it can revert, but good as for precisely the same reason vaccinating one family member is usually enough!

CB

We have friends who are dairy farmers in Devon - they (and others) were strongly of the opinion that it was the inspectors going from farm to farm that were spreading it!

That would be awful, not just or the farming industry, but would have a devastating impact on the population emerging from 2 years of lockdown restrictions, and the travel and vacation industries including staycations. It could tip the whole shaky economy into recession, even depression. Awful at any time, but this couldn't be a worse time.

Our historical response to foot and mouth is just shameful. We culled animals for a disease that poses little threat to humans.

Why, to keep the yield up. That's the only reason. Animals recover from the disease, and future stock can be vaccinated meaning no future impact on yield, but they refuse to vaccinate because it affects testing results.

Oh lord, no. To younger readers, the 2001 FMD outbreak severely restricted access to crags and hills for a good chunk of that year. We had to climb on Ramshaw, for goodness sake.

What about the animals!!  Recovery is not a smooth journey for many and young stock can die. Chronic lameness and debilitation are noted in recovered animals. The welfare of the animals is grim during disease.
 

There is not a single vaccine for the disease and vaccines are strain specific, so vaccination is not a universal panacea. However emergency 'ring' vaccination is an option that would find favour with me as it operates in a relatively short time to reduce signs and virus shedding.

I worked in a waste treatment plant in Leeds at the time, taking liquid effluent from the burn sites as they didn't have their own leachate treatment plants installed. Tankers used to turn up with tyres, wheels and usually the driver covered in all manner of shite.

We had to keep clearing the screens of bovine body parts, so much for biosecurity.

Just awful.  I can still clearly picture the huge fire burning carcasses clearly visible from the A30 near Okey. Our lack of "access" was nothing compared with the devastation of the rural communities. 

Hope they can act swiftly enough to contain this.

I meekly obeyed the restrictions for many weeks, until I couldn't take it any more and had an April Sunday on Cruachan. It was surreal, not a footstep in the snow other than mine, like being in the 1920s maybe, and I half expected to meet a ghostly E A Baker or Ronnie Burn.

It depends on the systems being used to farm cattle, grazing livestock can be the only way of producing food off marginal ground and they can be used to produce calories from other industries ranging from biofuel production to brewing and distilling. 

Are fripperies such as alcohol an efficient means of calorie production?

To be fair that's a British thing much more than a Dutch one. It does seem nuts to me that anyone can totally object to any farming based on animal grazing on land that can't sensibly be used for crops, be that rough upland, flood plain or whatever; even though some farming practices on such land can still be very bad, such as some of the slurry disposal issues producing massive concerns for river quality. A bit more subsidised would have been welcome as well, but it looks like Boris has U turned on that.

I'm not doubting that cattle farming has its place in a well-functioning circular society but the scale and industrialisation of the current agricultural/cattle sector (at least in such a small country as the The Netherlands) is currently out of all proportion. It's second in export volume only to the US, for a landmass I don't know how many times as small. 

Again, I'm not necessarily against cattle farming, merely against the scale it's currently happening in. I'm sure you can claim the same for alcohol production, especially taking into account water use. 

Yes and they pay German farmers to dispose of their manure by simply spreading it on their land, f_ucking up our rivers and groundwater reservoirs, and causing the EU to rightly fine Germany for exceeding nitrate levels. Manure brokering is an actual, well paid job! In any other industry disposing of hazardous waste would be much more tightly regulated.

Unfortunately the politicians responsible for farming and the environment, in particular in Lower Saxony where most of the manure dumping happens, are a bunch of corrupt criminals that have been bought by the industrial farming lobby.

Industrial farming is a crime against the environment also in plant production, in particular through the use of pesticides and weed killers over areas of square km at a time.

CB

Had the UK have opted to vaccinate in 2001 then animal recovery wouldn't have been a welfare issue. Yes a number of animals would still get sick and recover during the roll-out stage, but the animal welfare case doesn't hold water when culling a crazy number of healthy animals as they did.

This makes perfect sense.

Yes you would need the facilities to react quick enough but it's clearly required.

Not FMD - might still be SVD, but good news

Good News, then so far.

Nothing like the smell of glute in the morning!