Dr John Williams, state-employed veterinarian at DEFRA (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), Leeds.

"Foot and mouth almost certainly entered the UK through an illegal meat import. There are large areas of the world where it is endemic, and it is one of the most contagious diseases known to man. But Britain has been free since the last outbreak in 1981, and much of Europe has been free for years as well. Its not necessarily fatal, but it causes symptoms which severely set back the animal's production. If you imagine the whole of the skin of your tongue coming off, and the skin of the gums as well, then you don't eat that well and you take a long time to recover. Similarly, if the damage to the growing part of the hoof is so bad that the actual hoof comes off - you know what happens when you lose a nail - then raw tissue is exposed, and obviously in animals there's a very big risk of secondary infection. So it is a very serious disease and it causes enormous economic losses. The first time I saw the disease was in Kuwait. In the Middle East, where most farmers are peasants who keep animals as a means of feeding themselves, foot and mouth disease is present, and they just live with it. But in this country, where farming is a business, farmers can't afford to have animals loosing condition to that extent. In the early stages of the outbreak, it was spread was by the movement of infected animals. But later, it spread mostly through the movement of people and machinery. The areas where we've had big problems have all been places where farmers don't have farms within a Ôring-fence', so they have to travel about to see livestock on dispersed parcels of land. And if they have the disease, something like a quadbike will contaminate the road, and somebody else driving over that can take the infection onto another farm. From now until I die, whenever I see a quadbike I shall think of foot and mouth. Vaccination has been considered at every stage, but so far anyway, its been decided that it was not appropriate. The difficulty with vaccination is that once you vaccinate, the international status of the country changes, because countries that are free of foot and mouth and don't vaccinate are of the highest status. Once you vaccinate you go down in the pyramid, and some export markets are closed to you. The food industry in this country is also concerned that if we vaccinate, the general public would avoid meat from vaccinated animals in favour of meat from non-vaccinated animals, creating a two-tier domestic market. In reality, there's no justification for that, because its not a human health problem. Humans can't get foot and mouth. I think there's only one recorded case, and that was in 1967. They can become Ôinfected', but there's a big difference between Ôinfected' and Ôeffected'. However, humans can carry the disease, in the nasal passages as well as on clothes or shoes. And for this reason, through out the crisis, we have needed large numbers of vets, as we have to keep them separated into Ôclean' and Ôdirty'. Under normal circumstances, I have 10 vets in this division, but at the peak of the disease we had over 200. We need Ôclean' vets for surveillance, because you can't risk them carrying the disease onto a farm which doesn't have it, and the Ôdirty' vets we use for the duties of infected premises where its already been diagnosed, where it doesn't matter. Maintaining enough Ôclean' vets to be able to keep up the surveillance is an enormous task. We normally work on the basis of 72 hours to be able to get a vet from Ôdirty' to Ôclean'. In the meantime, he has to change all his clothes, wash them, shower, blow his nose, clean his nails and take all possible precautions to make sure he's not carrying the disease. About 70% of farms we've visited in response to a report of suspected foot and mouth have turned out to be negative - far more visits than actually diagnosing the disease. As there are only about 10,000 British vets, we've had to recruit vets from other English-speaking countries Ð US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa Ð and also from Europe. We've had two consignments of Hungarians Ð for the European countries who are looking for EU membership its particularly important for get experience, not only of the disease, but also of the ways the EU countries deal with it. In the early stages, there was discussion about the possibility of sabotage Ð it was suggested that it might have been caused by Sadam Hussein. He's known to be interested in biological warfare, and this is biological warfare par excellence. But to be fair, if you were going to do it maliciously, you wouldn't do it the way it was done. There are far more efficient ways. And there've been all sorts of rumours Ð like farmers buying in infected sheep at £500 so they could get the compensation and retire. It's a very easy accusation to make and its terribly difficult to refute, but we've no evidence and I don't think any of us are seriously suspicious of that".

Invitation for "Foot and Mouth night out" at DEFRA (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)