Stage One: How The Epidemic Began, 19-28 February

Commentary: How and when did it really begin; why was this so important; and why did the disease spread so fast?

Stage Two: Out of Control, 1-21 March

Commentary: Why was the Northumberland report ignored; and what was the hidden role of the European Union? .

Stage Three: The Computer Takes Charge, 21-31 March

Commentary: why was Professor Anderson's computer model so flawed; and was the 'contiguous cull' policy actually legal?

Stage Four: The Great Vaccination Battle, 27 March-mid April

Commentary: why were the worlds's top foot-and-mouth experts ignored, and what really lay behind an anti-vaccination campaign which was so blatantly based on misrepresenting the facts?

Stage Five: MAFF Against The Countryside, 1-30 April

Commentary: as the mass-cull policy sent a wave of shock through rural Britain, was MAFF now breaking the law on an unprecedented scale?

Stage Six: Fiddling the Figures, end-April to early-May

How the government was now deliberately manipulating the official figures to further Mr Blair's election plans.

Stage Seven: Mr Blair's Great Gamble, May-7 June

Could Mr Blair hide the continuing reign of terror over the countryside long enough to fool the public that the epidemic was over?

Stage Eight: Mr Blair's Pyrrhic Victory, 8 June-August

As the continuing mass-cull failed to stop new outbreaks, amid new revelations about the soaring financial cost of the disaster, how long would it be before the government was forced to recognise that the central purpose of its policy to restore exports in meat and livestock - had failed?

Stage Nine: The Great Inquiry Farce, end-August

Why, when Mr Blair finally announced his three 'independent' inquiries, it was clear that they would be nothing of the kind.

Conclusions

A summary of the main lessons to be learned from this story and a brief assessment of the role played by its various leading figures.

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Boring Initials: A Quick Guide

DEFRA: Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (formed to replace MAFF after June election)

FMD: Foot and mouth disease

IAH: Institute for Animal Health, Pirbright, Surrey, MAFF's main FMD research centre and reference laboratory

MAFF: Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (abolished after election, replaced by DEFRA)

NFU: National Farmers' Union (representing 40 percent of British farmers, under its president Ben Gill)

OIE: Office Internationale des Epizooties (based in Paris, worldwide rule-making body on issues related to animal diseases, including trade)

SVC: Standing Veterinary Committee (based in Brussels, the key European Union policy-making body on veterinary matters)

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Stage One: How The Epidemic Began, 19-28 February

On the morning of Monday 19 February 2001, Craig Kirby, 29, an official veterinary surgeon working for the government's Meat Hygiene Service at Cheale Meats abattoir in Little Warley, near Brentwood in Essex, was carrying out a routine inspection of pigs delivered from Buckinghamshire and the Isle of Wight. He had already noticed the previous Friday that some of the pigs were unusually lethargic. Now he saw blisters, possible signs of foot-and-mouth, a disease he was too young ever to have seen before, because the last major epidemic in Britain had taken place in 1967-8, before he was born.

Mr Kirby said later that he was 'stunned' and 'shocked'. At 11.36 am he informed a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), then halted all operations at the abattoir. I had always hoped that I would never see the disease" he said:"but I was sure it was foot-and-mouth, and I had to act quickly, because it spreads at a frightening speed".

Ministry vets immediately identified farms in Buckinghamshire, the Isle of Wight and Yorkshire from which the sick pigs had originated. A bull on a farm belonging to Cheale Meats next to the abattoir was confirmed with FMD, and destroyed immediately, along with 49 other cattle. Within hours five-mile movement restrictions had been imposed round the farms in Buckinghamshire and the Isle of Wight. The farm in Yorkshire was placed under surveillance. Arrangements were made for all the animals at the abattoir and on surrounding farms to be destroyed.

The following day, after tests at the government's official FMD laboratory in Pirbright, Surrey, MAFF's chief veterinary officer Jim Scudamore officially confirmed that this was indeed foot-and-mouth. Apart from a minor outbreak in the Isle of Wight in 1981, it was the first serious incidence of the disease in Britain for thirty four years.

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Why Was This So Serious?

For well over a century the foot-and-mouth virus had been feared by anyone connected with agriculture as much as any other disease affecting animals. It is highly contagious and spreads with remarkable speed, causing highly painful blisters in and around the animals' mouths and feet, causing severe lameness. It is particularly serious in cattle and pigs, for whom the disease can prove fatal. Those animals which survive may remain severely debilitated, causing weight loss and serious reduction in milk yields. For economic as well as animal welfare reasons, the virus is thus regarded as a major enemy, calling for drastic counter-measures and extreme vigilance. In Taiwan where, until 2001, the worst epidemic of FMD ever recorded affected the intensive pig-farming industry in 1997, 1 million pigs died and more than 3 million were slaughtered. The disease is much less obviously harmful to sheep, in which it may often be hard to detect. Most recover without evident after-effects, and although Britain's 2001 epidemic was first identified in pigs and cattle, the fact that it turned out to be primarily sheep-borne was a major complicating factor.

When the news that FMD had been identified in Britain was flashed to Brussels, the European Commission immediately, on Wednesday February 21, used its powers to impose a worldwide ban on all exports from Britain of livestock, meat and animal products, to last until March 1. The cost of this ban alone was estimated by the Food and Drink Federation to be #50 million. Looking obviously shaken, the minister of agriculture Nick Brown, said "the impact of this outbreak on our export trade is substantial". Mr Scudamore confirmed that MAFF was investigating whether the infected pigs had been fed on illegally imported meat. But three days after the virus was first identified, they still had not banned movements of animals around the country.

By Friday February 23, the number of confirmed outbreaks had risen to six (technically, one infected animal constitutes a 'case', two or more in the same herd or flock an 'outbreak', more than one outbreak an 'epidemic'). The Institute for Animal Heath's laboratory at Pirbright had by now discovered that Essex outbreak was caused by the O pan-Asian serotype of FMD (known as 'Pan-Asian O'). This was a comparatively new strain of the disease already responsible for outbreaks in 20 countries, including Japan, Korea, Mongolia and Russia, and closely linked to a strain found in South Africa, one of many FMD-infected countries from which Britain imported meat.*

* The foot-and-mouth virus has been identified in seven main strains, and dozens of sub-strains. Pan-Asian 0, the latest to appear, was first identified in India in the early 1990s. It first spread westward to the Middle East, then to the Far East. Itt reached south-eastern Europe in 1996, in the epidemic in Macedonia and the southern Balkans. It first reached western Europe when it came to Britain in 2001.

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After consulting the prime minister by telephone in Washington, agriculture minister Nick Brown at last announced a complete ban on animal movements throughout Britain for seven days. The Ramblers Association urged its members to stay out of the countryside. Farmers began erecting notices asking the public to stay off their land. All hunting was voluntarily called off for a week. Just as Ben Gill, the president of the National Farmers Union (NFU) was expressing the hope that the outbreak might still be confined to Essex, a spokesman for the National Pig Association said"MAFF is running all over the country trying to find the source. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Until they have that source, what can they say?".

Nothing was more vital to the MAFF vets now desperately overstretched because of a halving of their numbers by public spending cuts in the Thatcher years - than to discover where the disease had originated. And on that same day they came across a further new suspected outbreak at Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland. This was at a pig farm owned by two brothers, Bobby and Ronald Waugh, which had sent pigs down to Cheale's abattoir in Essex. By the following day, Saturday February 24, while two more suspected outbreaks were being investigated in Gloucestershire, one in Scotland and one in Northern Ireland, MAFF vets were already beginning to talk as if they had identified the Waughs' Burnside pig farm at Heddon-on-the-Wall as the original 'focus' from where the disease had spread. The farm had for several months been the subject of complaints from animal welfare campaigners, leading to investigations by the RSPCA, MAFF and local trading standards officials, even though on December 22 ministry inspectors had found the pigs"fit and healthy", and a further inspection as late as January 24 had shown no signs of foot-and-mouth.

On Sunday February 25, a seventh outbreak was reported in sheep near Okehampton in Devon. On Monday February 26 four more were reported, one in Wiltshire, one in Herefordshire and two more in Devon, where 600 cattle and 1500 sheep were to be destroyed on a farm owned by a prominent dealer, Willy Cleave, who had 12 separate holdings round the village of Hatherleigh. Richard Haddock, a senior NFU representative in Devon, said "real fear is gripping the farming community. Everyone down here is petrified". On the continent, as fears spread that animals imported from Britain might have introduced the disease to Holland, France and Germany, 300 tractors blocked roads into Brussels ahead of a meeting of EU farm ministers, Bernard Vallat, director-general of the Office International de Epizooties (OIE), a world-wide body which lays down international trade rules concerned with animal diseases, said "if the virus spreads to the continent, the entire EU would risk losing its status as free of foot-and-mouth disease".

By Tuesday February 27, nearly 7000 cattle, sheep and pigs had been destroyed, in various parts of the country. The Countryside Alliance decided to call off its London march scheduled for March 18. By Wednesday February 28, the number of confirmed outbreaks had risen to 26, in areas from southern Scotland and northern Ireland to Devon. The government took emergency powers to close off hundreds of thousands of miles of footpaths, shutting off much of Britain's countryside to tourism. As there were now reports of sheep imported from Britain testing positive in Germany, the regional agriculture minister for North Rhine-Westphalia said that Germany could be on the brink of a catastrophe".

After little more than a week, it was clear that Britain was experiencing its first major foot-and-mouth epidemic for 34 years. The difference was that, in 1967/8, the disease had been largely confined to cattle in just one small area of the country, Cheshire and Shropshire. This time it was not only showing itself in three different species, pigs, cattle and sheep, but it had already spread over an area covering the entire west side of Britain, stretching more than 400 miles. It was evident that, in trying to combat the disease, the government was now faced with a problem of a wholly different magnitude.

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What They Didn't Want Us To Know

1. How and When Did The Outbreak Really Begin: And Why Was This Significant?

Although MAFF continued to refer to the Waugh's pig farm at Heddon-on-the-Wall as the original source of the outbreak, it was never able to produce conclusive evidence to support this. For political purposes it was convenient to identify Burnside farm as the source, not least because it was an intensive pig unit which had aroused intense criticism on both hygiene and welfare grounds (MAFF was eventually to bring a series of criminal charges against the Waughs, for the way they had allegedly run their 'dirty farm').

There was equally no evidence to support the view, also fostered by MAFF, that the pigs had become infected by eating swill containing contaminated meat imported from abroad, obtained either from Chinese restaurants in Newcastle, or from a nearby British army barracks. The Albemarle barracks did use meat from Uruguay (a country with FMD), under EU procurement rules which require the British army to buy meat from the cheapest, usually non-British sources. But although it was politically convenient to identify pig swill as the cause of the epidemic (the government would later introduce severe restrictions on feeding swill to pigs), no proof that this was the original infectious agent was ever produced.

In fact circumstantial evidence increasingly suggested that the epidemic had not originated at Heddon at all; that foot-and-mouth had probably been around for months before it infected the Waughs' pigs; and that the species initially infected had been sheep, in which the signs of FMD are often hard to detect.

Once the epidemic had been identified, a number of farmers in south-west Scotland, the north of England and south Wales recalled that their sheep had shown signs compatible with FMD such as lameness, general debility and an abnormal tendency to abort in January or even earlier. David Owen of Farmers First, the organisation which ran the 'farmers ferry' transporting large numbers of sheep and lambs across the Channel to the continent, recalled that, as early as the previous October, he had noticed an unusual number of farmers from the Brecon Beacons and south Wales beginning to report that sheep they had booked on the ferry were too ill to travel, showing signs which in retrospect he recognised as compatible with FMD.

On January 31, Hugues Inizan, a Breton-born dealer living near Plymouth, used the 'farmers' ferry' to transport 402 sheep from around Abergavenny, Crickhowell and Builth Wells in south and mid-Wales to Normandy. After the first reports of foot-and-mouth in Britain, Marc Nozin, a French farmer who had bought half the sheep, asked the French authorities to test them. Seven of 31 sheep sampled showed up as 'highly positive' for foot-and-mouth. On March 7 all the animals on M.Nozin's farm were slaughtered. Yet these were sheep which had been transported to France, with health certificates signed by Welsh Assembly vets, nearly three weeks before FMD was officially identified.

All this made it seem totally implausible that the disease had originated at the Waughs' pig farm. FMD is quickly identifiable in pigs and the ministry inspector who visited the farm on January 25 had seen no sign of it. What was far more likely was that the pigs had caught it from nearby sheep rather than the other way around.

Inevitably the lack of hard scientific evidence encouraged widespread speculation as to the 'true' origins of the infection, such as suggestions that it had come from a phial of live 'Pan Asian O' virus stolen by animal rights activists from Pirbright or the Ministry of Defence's biological warfare research centre at Porton Down; or that it had escaped from a MAFF experimental farm in the north of England, where the ministry had been testing vaccines.

This speculation was further fuelled by evidence that, in the weeks immediately preceding the identification of the first outbreak, MAFF had been making enquiries about the availability of railway sleepers and other combustible materials, specifically linked to contingency plans for any outbreak of foot-and-mouth. Fran Talbot, whose husband ran a timber company at Wootton in Staffordshire, reported that she had been called by MAFF at the beginning of February. Another timber merchant, Mike Littlehales, of Seighford, near Stafford, had had a similar call from MAFF, asking whether he could"supply timber in case of foot-and-mouth", because they had wanted to"update their records". When two weeks later the first outbreaks were reported on the news, Mr Littlehales recalled saying to his wife"that seems very strange, that lady phoning me up a couple of weeks ago about the timber for foot-and-mouth. I wonder if they already knew then".

Until more complete evidence comes to light, the question as to how the epidemic began and whether or not MAFF had advance warning must remain open. Veteran FMD experts recall that such rumours about their origins were not unfamiliar in earlier epidemics. What is far more important, however, in terms of assessing the government's response to the appearance of the disease, is the near-certainty that it had been spreading through the national sheep flock for weeks and probably months before it was officially identified.

The significance of this emerged very quickly when, within days, it became apparent just how many areas of the country were affected. This made the 2001 epidemic totally different from the tightly-focussed 1967/8 epidemic, which had been concentrated in just one, comparatively small area. The traditional veterinary response to FMD, since the 19^th century, has been to stamp as hard as possible on the disease when it first appears, by killing all the animals in the herds or flocks infected, in the hope that it can be confined to"stage one" of its potential spread. "Stage two" is where it spreads outwards from the initial focus of infection, when inevitably it becomes increasingly hard to control. "Stage three" is where it becomes a 'multi-species' infection and begins to pop up in all sorts of places not obviously connected to the original focus, by which time it has become an epidemic out of control.

The problem with the 2001 epidemic was that, by the time it was officially recognised, it had already reached 'stage three'. Yet the response of the ministry was to try to treat it as if it was still in 'stage one', a focussed outbreak which could still be controlled by 'stage one' methods. From this point on, MAFF was always to remain way behind the game, with a disease which, nine days after it been identified, was already raging across 400 miles of Britain's countryside.

2. Why Did It Spread So Fast? The 'Black Sheep' Economy

The initial red herring was that FMD was first identified in pigs at an Essex abattoir; and that its original source was then identified, on very flimsy evidence, as a farm supplying pigs to that abattoir from 300 miles away in Northumberland. This prompted the Conservative agriculture spokesman Tim Yeo to blame the spread of the disease on the mass-closure of Britain's rural abattoirs, and MAFF's inadequate response to the shortage of state vets: overlooking the somewhat embarrassing fact that the closing down of three quarters of Britain's slaughterhouses in ten years had largely been due to the over-zealous application of EU hygiene rules by a Tory government of which Mr Yeo was a member; and that it had similarly been due to Tory cuts that the State Veterinary Service had lost half its staff.

The chief reason for the rapid spread of FMD in 2001 lay in the remarkable number of sheep movements which had taken place round the country in the weeks preceding the first outbreak, and in the emergence of a"black sheep economy" created by the peculiar rules of the EU's sheep subsidy system. As MAFF's vets attempted to trade 'dangerous contacts', they soon discovered that many of the sheep suspected of spreading the infection all down the west side of Britain had recently passed through one of the country's largest sheep markets at Longtown, near Carlisle in Cumbria, and other markets in Welshpool and Northampton. Many of these had been bought by a handful of big dealers, to be dropped around the country to allow the holders of EU sheep quota to make up the numbers of animals for which they had already claimed subsidies.

Late winter or early spring traditionally sees a large number of sheep movements, because this is the time of year when the previous year's lambs or 'hoggetts' are sold on for fattening before Easter when new lambs come on the market. But in recent years this trade has been greatly extended by the rules of the EU's so-called 'ewe premium' quota system. Farmers are allowed to claim 'quota' for the number of sheep on which subsidies are due in November. But they are not obliged to show ministry inspectors how many sheep they actually possess until February 4, the start of the so-called 'retention period'.

In the winter of 2000-1 quota had been absurdly cheap, partly because MAFF had over-estimated the previous year's sheep census by 1 million. A tiny minority of dealers and farmers had thus been buying up quota by the sackload, without having the sheep to justify it. There are of course draconian penalties for claiming subsidies on sheep which don't exist, which was why, around February 4, there was a rush to make deliveries of ewes all over the country, to match the quota for which subsidies were being claimed.

The trouble was that, since this practice was illegal, the movements of these sheep were not recorded. Which was why, when it turned out that many of the sheep bought 'out of ring' in Cumbria were infected and MAFF began trying to trace where they had all gone to, the task was all but impossible. Many ewes had been secretly dropped around the countryside, often in quite small consignments. They had even sometimes been moved on, after being counted by the inspector, so that they could be used to justify another illicit subsidy claim elsewhere ( 'bed and breakfasting'). Thanks to this racket, hundreds of thousands of potentially infected sheep had dropped off the ministry radar, just when it was vital to track them down to see where the disease might have got to. Thus did the 'black sheep' economy developed to exploit EU subsidy rules play its crucial part in ensuring that Britain's foot-and-mouth epidemic would become the worst ever recorded.

Stage Two: Out Of Control, 1-21 March

By March 1 the number of outbreaks had reached 32. Two days later, as the Daily Telegraph reported that the scale of the 1960s disaster was"unlikely to be repeated", it was up to 52, including Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway, Lancashire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire and the Isle of Wight. By March 6 it had reached 81 and the EU extended its ban on all UK meat exports to March 27. The next day it was up to 96, with four more counties affected, but MAFF's chief vet Jim Scudamore expected"the number of outbreaks to fall after the weekend". The following day it was up to 106 and Nick Brown admitted it was"impossible to say where it has gone".

By now, with 90,000 animals already killed or awaiting slaughter, television viewers were becoming all too familiar with the sight of huge pyres of burning carcases, sending oily, black clouds of smoke far across the countryside of Cumbria, Devon and other counties. But it was also becoming clear that the spread of the disease was far outrunning MAFF's resources to cope, let alone with the task of tracing all possible contacts with the markets from which it was suspected the infection had come.

Apart from killing all animals on farms found to be infected, MAFF's strategy was centred on declaring 'protection zones' extending two miles round each new"infected place" and"surveillance zones" extending anything up to 10 miles or more beyond that. 'Infected places' were served with an 'A' notice, meaning no one could move on or off the premises at all. Within a 'protection zone', which was eventually more precisely translated as being '3 kilometres' round an infected farm, farms were served with a 'D' notice. Here movement was still tightly controlled, and even in the wider 'surveillance zone', eventually defined after much ministry confusion as extending '10 kilometres' (it had originally spoken of '10 miles') animal movements, even sometimes across only a few feet of road, were banned except under an incredibly bureaucratic and inefficient licensing system. These restrictions in themselves not only prevented tens of thousands of farmers and their families from earning a living, but created severe anguish at the height of the lambing season, as they were forced to stay out in remote fields, often through the night in pouring rain, vainly trying to save lambs which were being born into inches of mud because the ewes could not be moved into dry quarters.

By March 11, with the number of outbreaks reaching 164, Nick Brown said he was"absolutely certain" that the disease was now"under controlwe are eliminating it". But there was now growing frustration and bafflement at almost every aspect of the way his ministry was tackling the epidemic. Often it was taking days before animals suspected of infection were slaughtered, thanks to the need for samples to be confirmed by Pirbright. It might then take days more for the carcases to be disposed of by burning. Meanwhile they lay bloated and putrefying in fields and farmyards. Even people living some miles downwind of pyres complained of the terrible smell, and of finding their gardens covered in shreds of half-burnt skin and flesh carried on the wind. MAFF announced that, as an alternative to burning, it had arranged for carcases to be transported to a rendering plant at Widnes in Lancashire, the first journeys to be made from Cumbria and Anglesey. But farmers along the route immediately began protesting that it was "outrageous" for infected carcases to be carried through up to 100 miles of uninfected countryside, in trailers which it could be seen were not properly sealed. With the first cases of the disease having been reported in Ireland, the Irish natural resources minister Hugh Byrne said"I believe myself that Britain has totally mishandled this" and that it was"nothing short of a scandal". Britain was now"the leper of Europe".

By March 13, when the number of outbreaks was up to 164, there was for the first time talk of Mr Blair having to postpone the general election he had planned for May 3. The chief vet Jim Scudamore spoke in veiled terms of the disease having been spread by"sheep dealers", without explaining why the system might have encouraged them to do such a thing. Michael Meacher, a junior government minister at the Department of the Environment with responsibility for the countryside, was appointed to head a 'task force' to advise on giving help to rural industries which were being severely damaged by the closure of the countryside, not least the tourist trade.

As a further case of FMD was confirmed in France, in sheep imported from Hereford and Worcester, the European Commission put out a statement supporting the United Kingdom's 'slaughter-and-burn' policy as the most effective way of tackling the crisis. The Commission, it was reported, did not believe the outbreak merited an "expensive vaccination programme", which would cost the whole of the European Union its 'disease-free status' and would effectively halt all exports of meat-based products to the outside world. This announcement came all-but out-of-the-blue, since the possibility of using vaccination had not so far been publicly discussed in Britain. But as early as March 6, Dr B.Dixon, the European editor for the American Society for Microbiology, had claimed that to ignore vaccination in the case of an epidemic like Britain's was to create"the perfect scenario for a disaster".

By March 15, when the number of outbreaks had risen to 240, MAFF announced a dramatic stepping up of its slaughter strategy. So bad was the situation in Cumbria that all animals within the '3 kilometre' zones would now be 'culled', even though they might be showing no signs of infection and entirely healthy. This caused such uproar that the following day Nick Brown issued a clarification. The new 'contiguous cull' policy, he explained, did not apply to cattle and pigs, only to sheep. But even this represented an extraordinary departure from any strategy used to tackle foot-and-mouth before. The reason for it was simply that MAFF had no idea where the disease might have spread to. It was therefore resorting to a mighty sledgehammer, in the hope of cracking all the possible nuts. And from now on, the 'contiguous cull' was to become a central weapon in MAFF's armoury, not just in Cumbria but wherever the disease was to be found.

MAFF also confirmed the same day that one of two dealers who seemed to be the 'main source' of the spread of the disease had been a Herefordshire sheep farmer Kevin Feakins. This explained why there was such a cluster of outbreaks around Herefordshire and Worcester, including several of his own holdings. The other dealer was Willy Cleave of Devon, many of whose holdings had similarly been infected, which also helped explain the concentrated cluster of outbreaks in that county.

On March 18, as the number of outbreaks reached 303, a rise of more than 60 in three days, a former Tory agriculture minister, Peter Walker, accused the government of"unbelievable incompetence". The Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated that the overall cost of FMD to Britain's economy, including damage to tourism, could eventually be #9 billion. On March 19 Jim Scudamore was given a slow handclap and heckled by a crowd of angry farmers and their families when he visited Cumbria. On a visit to Brussels, Nick Brown was given backing by his fellow EU farm ministers, but Anthony Gibson, the director of the NFU in the south-west said that in Devon, where there had now been 45 outbreaks, MAFF had"lost the battle". Devon trading standards officers said they were investigating 200 possible cases of "illegal sheep movements" in the county.

On 20 March, as the number of outbreaks reached 348, Ben Gill, the NFU president, spent an hour at 10 Downing Street, pleading with Mr Blair to speed up the slaughter and disposal programme. He pointed out the horrendous animal welfare problems which were now arising as millions of animals were prohibited from movement, having to live in desperately overcrowded conditions and running short of food. William Hague for the first time gave voice to serious criticism of the government, warning that the countryside was losing patience with its handling of the crisis. The army was for the first time called in, to play a limited logistic support role in helping to clear the huge and ever-growing backlog of culled animals in Devon.

The following day, March 21, the number of outbreaks rose to 411. The epidemic seemed out of control. If ever there was need for new thinking and a new strategy it was now. But with MAFF now in near total disarray where on earth was it to come from?

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What They Did Not Want Us To Know

The Hidden 'European Dimension'

One of the biggest puzzles in the early days of the crisis was why MAFF's strategy for tackling the disease was so dramatically different from that used 30 years earlier to bring the 1967/8 epidemic under control. Farmers were baffled as to why it seemed to be taking so long to slaughter and dispose of infected animals. Why did MAFF often have to wait days for samples to be confirmed as 'positive' by Pirbright? Why was it not possible for local vets to order slaughter on diagnosis? Why did they have to apply for authorisation to a committee of MAFF vets in London, at Page Street, Westminster? Why, after slaughter, was it then taking so long to dispose of carcasses? Why were they often having to be taken away to be burned, rather than buried on the spot in quicklime, as had been common practice in 1967? Similarly baffling was the thinking behind these '3 kilometre protection zones' and '10 kilometre surveillance zones'. Where had all this new strategy come from? Certainly Nick Brown and his officials never bothered to explain it.

The mystery only deepened when a retired senior vet from Shropshire, Ken Tyrrell, who had been at the centre of the 1967/8 epidemic, suggested to his local MP, Owen Paterson, that he should look at the report of the official inquiry into that epidemic, published in 1969. This had been carried out under the chairmanship of a highly-respected figure in the farming world of that time, the Duke of Northumberland.

The Northumberland report, as Paterson was quick to pass on to his political and media contacts, was an eye-opener. It came to a series of very firm conclusions as to how any future FMD epidemic should be tackled. The most important factor for curbing the spread of the disease, it urged, was speed. As soon as animals were diagnosed by a local vet as being infected, they should be slaughtered on the same day. They should then be buried the same day, on the same farm, in quicklime to kill off any remaining infectivity. The contrast between all this and MAFF's policy in 2001 could not have been more striking. It was as if every one of Northumberland's central recommendations, derived from an exhaustive public inquiry and published only a year after the epidemic ended, had been not just ignored but stood on its head.

Only due to careful trawling through the website of the European Commission did the explanation for all these riddles emerge to public view. The reason why MAFF's strategy for tackling foot-and-mouth had so dramatically changed was that the British government was no longer in charge of policy on foot-and-mouth. The power to determine how the disease should be tackled had been handed over to Brussels back in the 1980s. It emerged that the procedures any member state should adopt to respond to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth were now laid out in detail in a European Community directive, 85/511. It was this directive which had turned the Northumberland report on its head, by requiring, for instance, that there should be delays in slaughtering suspected animals until samples had been taken and approval received from the ministry. And it was this directive which had set up the '3 kilometre protection zones' and '10 kilometre surveillance zones', which in the early days caused such confusion among MAFF officials, with their talk of 'two miles' and '10 miles' because these protocols laid down by Brussels were so unfamiliar to them.

Since the EU now had ultimate control over the response to any outbreak of FMD within its territory, the British government was obliged to act within the terms of the directive in everything it did. It was bound to consult with the EU at every stage, in particular with its immensely powerful Standing Veterinary Committee (made up of the chief vets from each of the 15 member states), and to seek EU and SVC approval for any new policy decision. And in no respect was the EU's influence more relevant than in its policy on the use of vaccination, enshrined in a further directive, 90/423, to which we shall return in detail in a later section.

But these were not the only ways in which the EU had influenced the methods by which Britain was free to tackle the disease. Another highly significant reversal of earlier national policy derived from the EU's groundwater directive, 80/68, and the powers it gave to the Environment Agency to ban on-farm burials and the use of quicklime. This in itself overruled another of Northumberland's central recommendations, and became a major factor in creating those further delays between the slaughter of animals and the removal of their carcasses. It was true that nature had made on-farm burial difficult in some of the areas where in 2001 FMD was so prevalent. In Cumbria soil often provides only a thin cover for bedrock. In Devon an exceptionally wet winter had raised the water-table near the surface. But in general it was the new regulatory framework deriving from Brussels which now switched disposal away from on-farm burial to other methods, such as burning the carcasses on pyres, rendering them down into powder or dumping therm in mass-burial sites which had been approved as safe by officials of the Environment Agency. The irony was that, in the name of protecting the environment, this only created new environmental problems. Not only was there the risk of spreading disease by leaving infected carcasses lying around in fields, sometimes for weeks on end. There were also the hazards which might arise from toxic smoke given off by pyres; those posed by the need to transport vast quantities of carcasses along public roads; and finally those arising from contamination of groundwater by leachate from mass-graves, several of which, such as the one at Epynt in south Wales, were sited in what turned out to be wholly unsuitable places on the advice of the Environment Agency itself.

There were other respects in which the story of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis was heavily influenced by this hidden 'European dimension'. Whether or not imported meat turned out to be the original source of the infection, there was little the UK could do about it since, under EU trade rules, the British government no longer had the power to prohibit imports of meat from any country where meat plants had been approved of by Brussels. And it turned out that these included no fewer than eight countries where foot-and-mouth was still active, including Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Namibia and South Africa. Nevertheless, under world trade rules laid down by the OIE, exports were only permitted from regions within those countries certified as FMD-free. The same rules applied within the EU itself. Although when FMD appeared in Britain in February, the European Commission immediately imposed a blanket ban on exports of meat and livestock from Britain to anywhere else in the world, it might eventually be possible to relax that ban in favour of any UK regions, such as Northern Ireland or Scotland, which could be certified as disease-free ahead of the rest.

Yet another feature of the 'European dimension' which politicians seemed anxious to keep under wraps was that Brussels now had total control over what compensation could legally be paid to all those suffered financial loss as a result of the crisis. Farmers whose stock was slaughtered could be compensated for the market value of their animals, under an EU scheme to which UK taxpayers contributed 80 percent. But the EU made it illegal to compensate farmers who had been prohibited from earning a living because of movement restrictions on their animals, even though they were suffering severe financial losses solely as a result of government action. It would also be illegal under EU 'state aid' rules to compensate the huge number of other businesses which were now suffering severe economic damage, not least due to the closure of the countryside and the drying up of tourist income (it was estimated that tourism related to the countryside brought in #12 billion a year). One anomaly in this was highlighted when the government of the Isle of Man, which is only an 'associate' member of the EU and therefore not subject to these rules, was able to pay #1 million in compensation to its hotel industry for income lost when, as part of the rigorous efforts to keep FMD out of the island, the TT motorcycle races were cancelled. The British government would not have been permitted to do this.

But perhaps oddest of all, in light of the extraordinary degree to which Britain's policy on foot-and-mouth was now dominated by the shadowy presence of the EU, was the way this was hardly ever publicly mentioned. It would have been quite impossible to understand why the government responded to the 2001 epidemic in the way it did without grasping how far this was shaped by that key directive, 85/511, or of the power exercised from behind the scenes by the EU's Standing Veterinary Committee. Yet this was kept firmly away from general view, not just by ministers but even by opposition spokesmen like Mr Yeo. And one of the remaining mysteries of the story is why no reference was ever made to a document which was furnished by the British government to the European Commission in 1993, as one of the requirements of the EU's overall control of policy on foot-and-mouth. This was a detailed contingency plan drawn up by MAFF and approved by the Commission, laying out precisely what it intended to do in the event of any future outbreak of FMD in Britain. If Mr Blair had allowed a proper public inquiry, this document should have been the first item of evidence it called for. But to this day his government has behaved as if it never existed.

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Stage Three: The Computer Takes Over, 21-31 March

Outwardly on Wednesday March 21, MAFF and the government were still trying to bluff it out, pretending that everything was under control. When Mr Blair was asked by William Hague at prime minister's question time about his plans for the forthcoming elections, he stated that he was holding to the arranged date of May 3 for local elections. This was generally understood to cover his plans for a general election date as well. Mr Blair emphasised that to send out a signal that Britain was 'closed for business', as Easter and summer approached, would have very damaging consequences for the tourist industry.

But behind the scenes dramatic developments were afoot. Since late February, something rather curious had been going on at Imperial College, London, where particularly close attention had been paid to the unfolding foot-and-mouth crisis by a team of epidemiologists led by Professor Roy Anderson. The research team, including Dr.Neil Ferguson and Dr Christl Donnelly. had only been working at Imperial since the previous November, after Professor Anderson had resigned from his post as Linacre professor of zoology at Oxford University under something of a cloud (see panel).

Professor Anderson's speciality had been to use computers to model the epidemiology of human diseases, such as Aids, malaria and TB, although because of its possible links with human disease he had developed an interest in BSE, for which he was made a member of SEAC, the government's scientific advisory committee on spongiform encephalopathies.

Panel

The Man Behind the Computer

The story behind Professor Anderson's move to Imperial College began in January 1999, when he was suspended on full pay from his chair in zoology while the university authorities investigated complaints filed by his colleague Dr Sunetra Gupta. He had accused her, publicly and falsely, of gaining her post at Oxford by sleeping with another professor in the zoology department. Two months later Anderson was reinstated, after agreeing to apologise in writing to those concerned. This failed to satisfy Dr Gupta, who continued to press for a public retraction. A meeting attended by 26 readers, lecturers and professors in the zoology department passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in Professor Anderson. Meanwhile, an inquiry by the university into the research centre in the zoology department criticised his 'autocratic' management style: conditions at the centre were 'intolerable' and divisions ran 'very deep'.

A separate financial audit then found that Anderson had not disclosed either to the university or the Wellcome Trust, which largely financed his research centre, that he was a director and shareholder of International Biomedical and Health Sciences Consortium, a private consultancy firm which had close financial links with the centre. As director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, he had applied for over #4 million of research grants from Wellcome, while also being a Trustee of the Wellcome Trust itself, which awarded the grants. 'There was a degree of naivety on his part', a Wellcome spokesman said. 'He should have been aware of the procedures to be followed. The research centre was also receiving commercial grants which were not declared, in breach of the trust's regulations'.

On 9 May 2000, Anderson resigned his Oxford professorship and announced that he was taking up a chair at Imperial College. A month later, he finally gave Dr Gupta the formal apology she wanted, admitting that there had been 'no foundation in truth whatsoever' in his comments. He paid her legal costs plus damages of #l,000, which she donated to Save the Children. As she told the Daily Telegraph in June: "I felt nobody should be allowed to get away with this and remain in a position where they are making judgements about people's lives... I felt there was no other choice, no other way to protect myself or other people'.

Anderson also resigned from his seat on the Board of Trustees for the Wellcome Trust. His departure was announced by Wellcome on 11 March 2000 in somewhat opaque terms, stating that, 'in view of recent events at the University of Oxford', his resignation 'would be in the best interests of both the Trust and himself'.

The previous October, however, the team had broken new ground. Dr.Donnelly had produced a paper on previous foot-and-mouth epidemics, the team's first venture into the epidemiology of a disease which had no link to human illness. She concluded, like the Northumberland report, that the best hope of bringing an FMD epidemic under control would be to slaughter animals on the day of diagnosis. No sooner were the first outbreaks reported in February 2001 than, off its own bat and without any special funding. the team switched major resources onto studying the new FMD epidemic. Dr Ferguson fed data into his computer, arriving at the not entirely surprising conclusion that the epidemic looked in danger of running out of control. And on March 6 Anderson's old friend and Oxford colleague Sir John Krebs, chief executive of the government's Food Standards Agency, set up a meeting for the Anderson team to present their findings to a select invited audience, which pointedly did not include any representatives of MAFF.

On March 14, thanks to Krebs, MAFF was instructed to supply the Anderson team with all its latest data on delays between diagnosis and confirmation, and confirmation and slaughter (the crucial points on which the Northumberland recommendations had been so blatantly disregarded). This enabled the Imperial team to confirm that, due to the delays, and because each outbreak was now generating more than one other, MAFF had demonstrably failed to bring the epidemic under control. And this provided the basis for Prof Anderson and his colleagues to come up with a new strategy. There must be a dramatic speeding up of the slaughter programme. The only way to stop the epidemic spreading was, firstly, that all infected animals must be killed in 24 hours; and secondly, a point on which they were particularly insistent, all animals on farms within the 3-kilometre zone 'contiguous' to an outbreak must be slaughtered within 48 hours. Although it was not until the following day that MAFF announced its plan for a 'contiguous cull' in Cumbria, this principle was already central to the Anderson team's thinking.

On March 21, Krebs organised a further meeting for the Anderson team, this time with senior officials from MAFF, including the chief vet Jim Scudamore. Also present, very significantly, was the man who in January had been appointed the government's new Chief Scientist, Professor David King, a chemist from Cambridge. King, who knew Anderson well, had been appointed as Mr Blair's chief scientific adviser on the recommendation of the former chief scientist, Sir Robert May, now the president of the Royal Society. With Krebs, Anderson's former colleague at the Oxford zoology department, they were already a closely linked group. Anderson had co-written two books on epidemiology with May. All four were Fellows of the Royal Society. And these men, King and Anderson in particular, were about to become crucial to the story of foot-and-mouth, because King, although his speciality was 'surface chemistry', was about to use his authority as Chief Scientist to insist to Tony Blair that he should take a central role in co-ordinating direction of the crisis. As King himself later put it, in a Channel Four Despatches film"I decided I should impose myself on the situation". *

7 A curious little riddle of the story is why Dr Donnelly of the Anderson team should the previous October, apparently out of the blue, have produced a paper on previous epidemics of a disease which had not seriously affected Britain for 30 years. Since this was concerned with a virus which only affected animals, it was way outside the team's normal epidemiolgical remit. But when FMD appeared four months later, it certainly put the Imperial College team in an advantageous position to bid for involvement in what quickly became a major national crisis, calling on immense funding resources. Was the timing of Donnelly's paper just a happy accident? Or could the word have somehow come through to the team that a foot-and-mouth crisis might be on the way? One of the bodies best placed to pick up early warning signs was the Meat Hygiene Service, responsible for enforcing hygiene rules in abattoirs, which routinely takes random samples from animals passing through slaughterhouses. If tests had picked up the presence of FMD antibodies somewhere in the national sheep flock, the MHS would have passed this on to its parent body, the Food Standards Agency; and certainly something as significant as this would have reached its director Sir John Krebs. It would then have been quite natural for Krebs to ask his old friend Roy Anderson what he knew about foot-and-mouth, which might in turn have prompted the idea of a paper on previous epidemics, to provide useful background if another one was to materialise.

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In front of King, Anderson's team explained to the MAFF representatives how their computer model was now predicting that, without a drastic switch in strategy, new outbreaks would, by early May, be reaching 400 a day. In other words, MAFF's strategy was failing hopelessly. The only hope of bringing the epidemic under control, the computer had shown, was massively to accelerate the slaughter rate, according to Anderson's '24 hours/48 hours' formula, and in particular to step up the contiguous cull.

King was now certain that Anderson's model was the key to a dramatic change of strategy. As the number of outbreaks soared past 400, MAFF had shown itself as wholly inadequate to the task. Anderson's strategy, backed by all the authority of a sophisticated computer programme, seemed to offer the only hope. That night, March 21, with King's blessing, Anderson went on Newsnight to tell the nation that the disease was 'out of control' and that his 24 hours/48 hours strategy was the answer. This was a calculated slap in the face for MAFF and Nick Brown, who weakly protested next day"the phrase 'out of control' implies that we are being beaten, and that the disease is being allowed to let rip, I believe that is not the case". But, as King had engineered, the power had now moved decisively away from Brown and MAFF, into his own hands. On the same day, March 22, on his way to a meeting of EU heads of government in Stockholm, Mr Blair made a flying visit to Cumbria, where he ran into a hail of abuse from groups of local farmers and their families. He was visibly shocked by the scale of the slaughter, which brought home to him as never before what was really going on out in the countryside. He was also for the first time warned of the far greater disaster which might be looming when millions of cattle, still under cover for the winter, came out in the spring to graze on pastures which might have been infected by sheep. He admitted that the government now had"massively to gear up to the scale of the challenge". And behind the scenes there was now one man above all, Professor King, who was advising him on what was to be done.

Blair let it be known that he was activating the government's crisis-management committee Cobra to launch a new offensive against the disease, under his personal leadership. Cobra would be advised by a 'Chief Scientist's Advisory Group', chaired by King, of which Anderson was the leading member. From now on these two men would play the central role in directing the crisis. And on March 23, as the number of outbreaks reached 430, King personally announced the government's new strategy, based on Anderson's '12 hours/24 hours' formula. The coup d'etat over MAFF was complete.

Nothing by now more clearly demonstrated the failure of MAFF's strategy than an absolute explosion in the reported numbers of new outbreaks. The total was now rising almost exponentially, at 30, 40 or 50 a day. In just ten days between March 21 and the end of the month the figure was to more than double, from 411 to 846.

There was now also a second component to the King/Anderson strategy, which equally served to highlight Mr Blair's determination to show that he was now acting personally to bring this disaster under control. This was greatly to step up the involvement of the army, to organise the hopelessly chaotic slaughter and disposal programme on military lines. When the contiguous cull policy got fully under way, as King and Anderson had advised, this would be crucial. On Blair's visit to Cumbria he had instructed the telegenic Brigadier Alex Birtwistle that he was now to take full charge of operations in the area. And one of Birtwistle's first moves was to order the clearing of a massive new burial pit for half-a-million carcasses on a disused airfield at Great Orton. The first piles of dirty dead sheep were unceremoniously dumped into the pit on March 26. From now on, it was hoped, there would be fewer of the horrendous funeral pyres which had given such an unhappy image of Britain to the world. But one thing which particularly alarmed Blair was to be told that, under rules related to BSE, it would only be legal to bury sheep in these vast pits. If the epidemic spread en masse to those cattle when they came out to their summer pastures, the media would once again be filled with bonfires of blazing carcasses, Those cattle were certainly threatening to become a major political problem.

On the day the mass-burials began at Great Orton the agriculture minister Nick Brown flew up to Cumbria to show himself at the centre of events, and was again angrily heckled for his pains. But in terms of real power he had now in effect been sidelined. The man who now saw himself at centre stage, with his new allies King and Anderson behind him, was the prime minister. And on March 23, at the EU Council meeting in Stockholm, he had already been caught betraying what was now uppermost in his mind. The European Commission's president Romano Prodi asked him how long it was before he needed to make a final decision on whether to postpone his May 3 election date."Ten days" he replied in an unguarded moment, before realising that a television camera was peering over his shoulder. In fact those next ten days were to confront Mr Blair with what was to turn out to be the most fateful decision of the whole story.

What They Did Not Want Us To Know

1. Why was Prof Anderson's computer model so fatally flawed?

What was particularly odd about the two scientists who had now in effect been put in charge of the crisis was that neither had any background in veterinary science. Professor King, the Chief Scientist and now Mr Blair's key adviser, specialised in 'the chemistry of surfaces'. Professor Anderson's expertise was using computers to predict mainly human epidemiology. Yet it was now on the basis of his computer model that the government had made a major shift in policy, designed to crush the disease literally by overkill. His stepping up of the controversial 'contiguous cull' strategy in particular was designed to stop the disease in its tracks by wiping out huge numbers of animals as quickly as possible, even though many might never have been exposed to the disease at all.

No one, it emerged, was more critical of Anderson's model than the government's own senior foot-and-mouth experts at the Animal Health Institute's laboratory at Pirbright, a 'world reference centre' for the disease. Dr Paul Kitching, the institute's deputy-director and head of FMD research, told Nick Brown on March 29 that in his view the model was flawed because it was based on inadequate or misleading data. This was not least because it did not take account of the differences between the way various species reacted to the disease; and because it exaggerated the effect of windborne spread in this particular strain of FMD, as he had confirmed from direct experience in the Far East. His researches convinced him that the 'contiguous cull' was scientifically unjustified, even"a total suspension of common sense". He repeated his criticisms to Prof King's scientific advisory committee in early April where he was later described by Prof Anderson as having been a 'lone voice' - although he was subsequently supported in a paper by Dr Alex Donaldson, Pirbright's director, and three of his staff.

But the real problem with the computer model, other experts suggested, went even wider, and could unkindly be summed up in that familiar computer axiom 'garbage in, garbage out'. The data Prof Anderson and his team were feeding into their programme might be misleading for at least four further reasons.

Because the ministry figures were based on an unreliable assessment of the starting-point of the epidemic which had almost certainly begun months before mid-February the epidemic curve stretched back much further and was therefore flatter than the ministry allowed for. The curve was also seriously distorted by the inability of ministry tests to distinguish between 'old' cases of infection and 'new'. Yet it was on this profile that Anderson's predictions of its future course were based.
To a significant extent, the reporting of new cases depended on the veterinary resources available to carry out diagnosis and tracing of contacts. Initially the ministry had only 217 vets available, resulting in an under-reporting of the true course of the disease. By the end of March the number had risen to 1400, which led to a much higher degree of reporting. Thus the basis on which the data was compiled was seriously inconsistent.
The computer data were further to be skewed by the contiguous cull itself, when, in late April, the ministry decided that most animals killed under the cull should no longer be tested (as would be confirmed by Jim Scudamore in evidence to the Commons Agriculture Committee). The cull was thus destroying the evidence crucial to understanding the true incidence of the disease. It was impossible to know how many of these animals might have been infected, either currently or during earlier months.
The figures were also skewed by lack of tracing or testing away from recognised infection zones, either of farm stock or of wild animals which were potential carriers, such as deer. It was thus difficult to know where else the disease might have spread or might be spreading.

Any of these factors in isolation might have influenced the accuracy of computer predictions as to the course of the epidemic. In combination they could have introduced such distortions as to make the computer model almost worthless. Yet from now on it was this model which more than anything else was to guide the government in its response to the epidemic.

2. Was the 'contiguous cull' actually legal?

A quite separate question, not to be put to any proper legal test for three months, was whether the government actually had the power in law to authorise the mass-slaughter of healthy animals which, since March 15, had progressively become such a central feature of its strategy.

EU law, in directive 85/511, permitted compulsory culling of all stock on a farm which had tested positive for FMD, but not the slaughter of animals on contiguous holdings. However the law claimed by MAFF as its authorisation was not the directive but the UK's own Animal Health Act 1981. This not only required the slaughter of all stock on a holding diagnosed as infected. It widened this out to include any animals which a veterinary official might, on his discretion, have reasonable grounds for supposing had been exposed to infection. But when this point came to be tested in the High Court in June, in the case of Grunty the pig (see Stage Eight), Mr Justice Harrison ruled that it could not be interpreted as a blanket permission to kill any animals just because of some general principle. Each case had to be assessed separately, on its individual merits. This was certainly not the principle behind the contiguous cull policy launched in March, which relied on precisely that type of 'blanket slaughter' allowing for no discretion which Mr Justice Harrison was eventually to rule was not authorised.

On this basis, it seems clear that the contiguous cull programme, under which millions of healthy animals were to die, was in breach both of EU and UK law. This may explain why, over coming months, in more than 100 cases where its officials were challenged, MAFF was to back down. But the vast majority of farmers clearly found it hard to conceive that the government might itself be acting in flagrant breach of the law and accepted the legality of its actions without challenge. They were further induced to acquiesce in the scheme by the fact that they were in most cases being offered compensation significantly higher than the market value of their animals; and by the fact that they were encouraged to do so by the NFU. When farmers rang the NFU to ask about their right to challenge the contiguous cull, they were urged to ring a number which turned out to be a MAFF helpline.

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Stage Four: The Great Vaccination Battle, 21 March-23 April

We now come to what was to be the most crucial episode of the whole story. It involved a debate and a power struggle which were to last for several weeks. Had these gone the way many people hoped, the outcome of the story might have been dramatically different. But so shrouded was this battle in confusion and disinformation that only now is it possible for the first time to reconstruct what really happened.

By March 22, it seemed the prime minister had firmly opted for what was now to be the government's new strategy: to stamp out the disease by means of Professor Anderson's accelerated mass-slaughter programme. But almost immediately the increasingly fraught Mr Blair came under pressure to go for a totally different approach.

A week earlier, when the number of outbreaks was still only 183, the European Commission had issued a statement firmly dismissing any suggestion that an answer to the crisis in Britain might be to make widespread use of vaccination. This, the Commission warned, could cost the whole of the European Union its international trading status as a 'disease free area', effectively denying EU meat exporters access to valuable overseas markets, including North America. For more than ten years the European Community had particularly prized its status as an area wholly free of foot-and-mouth disease; and although this had only been achieved through nearly 30 years of routine vaccination against FMD by most member states, Brussels had taken a historic decision in 1990, ironically on a British initiative, to outlaw the use of vaccination except in dire emergency. This was because, under OIE rules, it could thus be accorded the international highest trading status, as a disease-free region which did not use vaccination (see Commentary).

Nevertheless the directive enshrining the new anti-vaccination policy, 90/423, did allow for the possibility that, in emergency circumstances, the use of vaccination might be permitted. By mid-March, when Britain's epidemic was so out of hand that it threatened to spread the disease to the rest of the EU, a growing number of international experts began to suggest that this was precisely the type of emergency in which vaccination should be used. These included Professor Fred Brown, an Englishman working for the US Institute of Animal Health at Plumb Island, New York, a Yale professor and former deputy-head of the Pirbright institute, generally acknowledged to be the leading authority on FMD in the world; and Dr Simon Barteling, a leading Dutch vet who had taken charge of epidemics in 23 countries and had been the man employed by the Commission in 1990 to frame its new policy laid down in directive 90/423. These distinguished veterinary scientists had no doubt that modern vaccines, used in many parts of the world, would be effective in Britain. As recently as 1996, when the same 'Pan Asian O' strain had caused a serious epidemic in Albania and Macedonia, the EU itself had been quick to set up an emergency vaccination programme to prevent the spread of the disease across the EU's own frontiers. The epidemic had been brought skidding to a halt in weeks.

By the closing days of March, as the epidemic curve soared, determined efforts had been made behind the scenes to bring the arguments for vaccination to Mr Blair's attention. The key moment came when Prince Charles sent him a paper by Dr Keith Sumption, a veterinary expert from Edinburgh University, condemning the mass-slaughter policy as ineffective and arguing strongly for emergency vaccination. And on Tuesday March 27, using Sumption's paper as his main technical evidence. a multi-millonaire publisher Peter Kindersley, who ran an organic farm in Berkshire, went to the London High Court to argue the case for vaccination and against the legality of Anderson's mass-cull.

The most vocal opposition to any such switch of policy, it seemed, would come from the leadership of Britain's farming community, the veterinary establishment and MAFF itself. Britain had never historically practised vaccination for FMD, even during the decades when it was routinely used across the continent. In 1972, a secret report compiled by Pirbright after the 1967/8 epidemic had confirmed that this should remain national policy. And right from the start of the present crisis, scorn had been poured on vaccination by senior vets, such as Keith Baker, the past president of the British Veterinary Association, who claimed it offered"no guarantee" of protection, and that"stamping out the disease by slaughtering infected animals wins every time". For the NFU the most important factor was that vaccination would cost Britain its disease-free status and an export trade in meat, meat products and livestock which MAFF said was worth #570 million a year, even though this was already far outweighed by the financial damage inflicted by the 2001 epidemic on the UK economy as a whole.

But Mr Blair was by now seriously wondering whether vaccination might be the answer to what had become the most urgent of all his political problems. It had already been made clear, both publicly and privately at a meeting of EU farm ministers, that there was no way the European Commission would permit a full-scale vaccination programme. But what was nagging at the prime minister more than anything was the thought of a massive upsurge in the epidemic when those cattle in Cumbria and elsewhere came out to grass. "A few days ago" he admitted to the House of Commons on Wednesday March 27, vaccination was"generally regarded as anathema to very large parts of the farming community". But"things which may have seemed utterly unpalatable a short time ago have to be on the agenda". That same day, on Blair's instructions, MAFF applied to Brussels for urgent permission to carry out a limited vaccination programme to protect cattle in the two worst-hit areas: 100,000 in Cumbria and 80,000 in Devon. This was not any wholesale conversion to vaccination as a way of ending the epidemic, which the Commission had already ruled out. It was a carefully calculated political expedient. What Mr Blair wanted to avoid above anything else was the possibility that, in the run-up to the election, still planned for May 3, the nation's television screens might again be filled with those blazing funeral pyres, as hundreds of thousands of dairy cows went up in smoke.

When Nick Brown announced to the Commons that his officials were applying to Brussels for this permission to vaccinate, he was scarcely able to conceal his distaste for a move which seemed to contradict his ministry's oft-stated policy on the issue. He could not resist adding that any resort to vaccination would delay a return to the exporting of cattle and meat, and that any cattle vaccinated would probably have to be slaughtered later anyway.

What made this last detail particularly odd was that the MAFF application, approved by the EU's Standing Veterinary Committee on March 30, expressly prohibited the slaughter of the vaccinated cattle. What the UK was applying for, under directive 90/423, was 'protective', not 'suppressive' vaccination. Nevertheless, also built into the permission MAFF had asked for was an interesting little 'poison pill' which might prove very helpful in stoking up any opposition to vaccination from farmers. The small print of the Commission's permission set restrictions on the sale of meat or milk from any animals vaccinated which would impose severe financial loss on the farmers who owned them. In fact, under Council decision 90/424, the EU specifically allowed for farmers to be compensated for such losses. But MAFF carefully omitted to explain this to the farmers. Indeed it gave them to understand that there was no way round these financial disincentives, and this was later to be used by the NFU as powerful evidence in its campaign to persuade farmers against any use of vaccination.

The NFU's immediate response to the vaccination plan was one of horror. Its president Ben Gill later recalled"I was actually speechless. What's happened? Only a few days ago this wasn't an option". But the really significant opposition to this move towards vaccination was not that from the NFU and MAFF. It was that coming from the man who now occupied the most influential position of all in the government's fight against the disease, Professor Anderson. This initiative seemed to pose a direct challenge to the strategy with which he was now so firmly identified, the accelerated mass-slaughter policy, which even Professor King was now predicting could end up killing half of all Britain's 65 million farm animals. The Anderson team had always been fervently opposed to vaccination against FMD (which was odd, considering how useful it had shown vaccination to be in its epidemiological studies of human diseases). Privately they had already made common cause with Ben Gill and the NFU, as useful allies in fronting any public battle against it. And from now on, behind the scenes, the resistance to the new policy favoured by Mr Blair was to be relentless.

On Thursday March 29, as the outbreak total reached 729, Gill and other 'farmers' leaders', briefed by Anderson, sought a meeting with Blair to launch their counter-attack. For 90 minutes they pressed their case against vaccination, claiming there were 'positive signs' that Anderson's cull policy was already working. The Scottish NFU leader Jim Walker said that vaccination would be"an admission of defeat". Faced with such an onslaught, the prime minister put off a decision on whether to implement vaccination in Cumbria and Devon until after the weekend. This would give four more days to assess whether the Anderson strategy was working. In the High Court, Kindersley was given leave to appeal against the slaughter policy.

The following day, March 30, 64 more outbreaks were confirmed, the highest daily total so far. On Monday April 2, at Mr Blair's request, four leading pro-vaccination campaigners came to 10 Downing Street to discuss the Sumption paper: Patrick Holden of the Soil Association, Fiona Reynolds, director of the National Trust, Gareth Davies, a former EU veterinary adviser and Lawrence Woodward of the Elm Farm research centre, a close associate of Peter Kindersley. They found Blair 'very supportive' (so much so that Kindersley now decided there was no need to continue his case). And although he had not yet decided on giving the go-ahead for Cumbria and Devon, he later that day signalled the chief reason why he was now so preoccupied by foot-and-mouth, when he emerged from Number 10 to announce that he was delaying the general election until June 7.

That evening Ben Gill and Nick Brown met for dinner at a Millbank restaurant. They took advantage of the delay in implementing the limited vaccination programme which had now been given EU permission, to hatch a plan which might delay it further. If cattle farmers could be persuaded to keep their animals indoors longer than usual (and in this the cold, wet spring was already giving assistance) this might take off the pressure to vaccinate for some weeks longer.

Meanwhile, faced with what he perceived as a threat to his mass-cull strategy, Professor Anderson went into overdrive. Using his authority as the leading member of King's Chief Scientist's Group, he and his team rushed together a secret report to be sent to the prime minister, pouring scorn on vaccination and claiming that, even if all the 60 million farm animals in the UK were vaccinated, this would merely have the effect of masking the disease, leaving it to strike again within weeks or months. On Wednesday April 4, the outbreak total passed the 1000-mark, reaching 1020. The anti-vaccination campaign now recruited representatives of the food processing industry, headed by Peter Blackburn, chief executive of Nestle, which derived 75 percent of its powdered baby milk from cows around Cumbria. On April 5 the Chief Scientist's Group used Anderson's paper to brief the NFU against any use of vaccination to control the current epidemic. By Monday April 9, when outbreaks reached 1137, Nick Brown claimed that, thanks to the Anderson strategy, the rate of new outbreaks was now diminishing and warned, along the lines suggested in the Anderson paper, that any use of vaccination might mean the epidemic lasted longer. And on April 11 Anderson showed his skilful exploitation of the media when the Daily Telegraph published a full page feature by its science editor Roger Highfield, headed"Has The A-Team Defeated The Virus?". This was an adulatory profile of Anderson's team, complete with dismissive comments on vaccination and graphs from the famous computer showing how, if the accelerated slaughter-and-cull strategy had not been implemented, the epidemic would have reached 400 outbreaks a day by early May. But the graph also showed how, thanks to the cull strategy, outbreaks were now expected to drop to zero in early June, helpfully marked by the Telegraph as coinciding with Mr Blair's chosen election date.

Mr Blair was still convinced that vaccination might be a vital political weapon. On April 12, at a secret meeting at Chequers and with persuasive help from Chris Haskins, chairman of Northern Foods, he won unanimous agreement from representatives of major food companies that vaccination was the way forward. As a deliberate stalling tactic, the NFU put a long list of 52 technical and legal questions to MAFF (to many of which they already knew the answers). But the following day, April 13, Blair was briefed with the shocking news that the number of slaughtered animals awaiting disposal was now nearing a million, and that MAFF was still falling way short of Anderson's crucial 48-hour target for culling contiguous farms. It seemed there simply were not the resources to make the Anderson strategy work. Mr Blair instructed Nick Brown to persuade the farmers that vaccination was now the only alternative, in advance of announcing the programme for Cumbria and Devon four days later, on Tuesday April 17.

Mr Brown set about his task without conviction. Vaccination, he limply told BBC1's Countryfile,"would only work as a strategy if everyone involved was committed to making it work". Anderson's ally Professor King was despatched to Cumbria to talk the farmers round, to predictably little effect. The NFU's anti-vaccination campaign was now in full swing, centred on the claim that vaccination would delay any restoration of export status by"at least 12 to 18 months", and echoing Anderson's point that it would only prolong the epidemic rather than eradicate it. On April 19 Anderson again made powerful use of the Daily Telegraph, when a 'leaked' copy of his paper led the front page, under the headline"Warning On Vaccination Swept Aside". A"confidential report from the government's scientific advisers" wrote agriculture editor David Brown,"warned Tony Blair two weeks ago that foot-and-mouth vaccination could do more harm than good". It could"prolong the epidemic" and could"threaten food exports worth #30 million a week".

Seeing the effect of all this on the bemused farmers whose support was vital to the success of any vaccination programme (and increasing numbers of whom had been swinging round in support of vaccination), pro-vaccination groups led by the Soil Association, the National Trust, Friends of the Earth, the RSPB and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, counter-attacked by claiming that farmers were being wildly misled by all the propaganda from farming organisations. They had not yet discerned just how limited and political were Blair's reasons for wanting vaccination, nor the hidden role played in the campaign against it by Professor Anderson. But they still confidently expected vaccination to be given the green light when the Commons agriculture committee assembled in the week beginning April 23, for sessions on foot-and-mouth with Nick Brown, his chief vet Jim Scudamore and Professor King. Firstly Mr Brown announced that, in light of continuing resistance from farmers and the food industry, coupled with growing evidence that the slaughter policy was containing the disease,"the case for vaccination recedes as the daily number of cases declines". Then Professor King handed out to the incredulous MPs a photocopied graph. This showed that the precise date on which Professor Anderson's computer was now predicting the epidemic curve would finally hit zero was June 7; the very day Mr Blair had chosen for his election. It was a brilliant double ambush. Vaccination had been snatched off the agenda in the nick of time. Professor Anderson and his allies had won the day. And there was nothing Mr Blair could say or do about it, except privately to resolve that, when the election was over, his agriculture minister would be demoted, as humiliatingly as possible.

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What They Did Not Want Us To Know

Why Was Vaccination Never Really On The Agenda?

The most remarkable feature of the great vaccination battle was how many of the scientific and political facts relevant to proper understanding of the issue remained obscured from public view. There were really two quite different battles going on at the same time in March and April. One was the general debate as to whether a full-scale vaccination programme should have been the quickest, cheapest and most effective way to stop the epidemic. The other was the much more limited programme Mr Blair was in the end pressing for, intended to serve what was essentially just a political purpose.

As to the fundamental debate, the basic scientific facts should have been indisputable. But the way these became fogged in confusion and controversy made this a classic case-study of how distorted science can become when it moves into the political arena.

In essence, the case being made by the genuine scientific experts on FMD, like Professor Fred Brown, Dr Simon Barteling and other world-class vets, was very simple. It was backed by years of first-hand experience and the knowledge of how rapidly the science of vaccination had been advancing even in the preceding few years. What they tried to explain, as did Brown and Barteling at a press conference in London on April 24, was that the proper use of modern, oil-adjuvanted, single-dose, high-payload 'killed' vaccines would have been enough to stop the entire British epidemic in its tracks within a few weeks. They would have begun with 'ring-vaccination' round every infected area and worked inward until the disease was eradicated. Seriously Infected animals might still have had to be culled. But within 48 hours of vaccination animals would have ceased to be capable of passing on infection. There was no scientific reason why vaccinated animals should be slaughtered, or why their meat and milk should not enter the human food chain (every supermarket in the country offers meat from animals which have been vaccinated for other purposes). Modern vaccines are effective against a full range of FMD strains. And by the end of March more than enough vaccine could have been made available to carry out a vaccination programme sufficient to bring the British epidemic quickly to an end.

There was no stronger evidence in support of this case than the track-record of vaccination where it had been used elsewhere in the world; not least in the dramatic success of the EU's own emergency vaccination programme in Albania and Macedonia in 1996, which brought a serious epidemic of 'Pan Asian O' to an end w

Contents

Stage Three: The Computer Takes Over, 21-31 March

What They Did Not Want Us To Know