Unlike mad-cow disease, foot-and-mouth represents little danger to the public health, but it is a critical economic blow to European farming. It is not a prion disease. It is seldom fatal to animals and is rarely transmissible to humans. What it does, though, is cause blistering of the mouths and feet of animals with cloven hooves, as well as eventual lameness, loss of appetite and wasting. And it is so contagious–it can be carried in dust particles clinging to a car antenna–that one infected animal can easily contaminate the entire herd. “It is like a ball at the top of the hill: you know it is going to pick up speed,” said James McInnes of Britain’s National Farmers Union. To protect their business, European farmers have started to exterminate at-risk animals and quarantine the others. And because farmers are not shipping livestock, meat production in Britain, at least, has virtually ceased. Until the epidemic is contained, British farmers stand to lose about $86 million a week. European governments have already offered their farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in relief.
Ever since the British quelled a 1967 outbreak of FMD by slaughtering 447,000 animals, Western European health officials had thought the disease was licked. But the virus has long been endemic in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America. In an increasingly global market, where people and animals can move freely across borders, a disease like foot-and-mouth can spread quickly from one continent to another. At the end of last week there were no confirmed cases of the disease in mainland Europe. If it does spread, last week’s alarm will seem pretty tame.
The USDA is downplaying the new risk, but it banned the importation of pork products from Britain as soon as it heard of the outbreak. And independent scientists are far less sanguine. To infect the U.S. meat supply, “all someone would have to do is go to a farm in England and then go to a farm here,” says Dr. Lewis Thomas, West Virginia’s state veterinarian. “We have hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of livestock, and they would have to be slaughtered. It would be beyond the realm of comprehension.”
