Received via email November 9th 2007

Your list of recommendations from the Inquiries - oh bravo, and such a help. Is the following helpful from Northumberland Report (of four decades ago)? 

i) the mental anguish of a crude slaughter policy. Part One.  See below excerpts.

ii) recommend after the experience of the 1967 epidemic that contact animals should first be tested (because sophisticated tests available even then) to establish if high risk - if high risk then slaughter. Part Two.

 

(Your links )

http://www.warmwell.com/northhld1.pdf

http://www.warmwell.com/northhld2.pdf

 

Anne

175. "We consider, as did nearly all our witnesses, that the slaughter policy has been an essential measure in controlling foot-and-mouth disease in Great Britain, and that irrespective of whether a vaccination policy were adopted, slaughter would need to be continued. Nevertheless we recognise the  consequences of this policy to farmers and to those who have to implement it. We fully subscribe to the views expressed by the Gowers Committee who wrote as follows:

“We wish to make it clear at the outset that we are not among those those who regard stamping-out [the slaughter policy] with complacency. We sympathise with the widely expressed view that it is a crude and primitive way of dealing with a disease. We know what a harrowing duty it is for the officers of the Ministry who have to carry it out.  We recognise the mental anguish it may cause to those who suffer its consequences, and   the shattering disaster, not computable in terms of money, that it may bring to a farmer who has to see the work of a lifetime destroyed in a day.”

 36. ....Diagnostic techniques are now available which can show the presence of virus before clinical signs appear and we therefore recommended that material (including samples taken by probing) from all suspected in contact animals that have been traced should be tested in the laboratory for the presence of virus.  Where the risk is high, the animals should be slaughtered.