As the smell of burnt cow meat once again wafts across the southern English countryside, the stench is not only casting a pallor across the faces of Surrey farmers, but also threatening to expose the sordid relationship between the UK government, U.S. big business and the little-known world of "bio-terrorism".
The first outbreak of a resurgent foot and mouth disease (FMD) occurred last Friday on a farm in Surry England. A second herd of cattle, less than two miles away tested positive for the foot and mouth disease yesterday, frustrating British farmers who were hoping for a quick end to the crisis and eager to avoid a repeat of the massive slaughter and burning of 6 million animals in 2001.
It has now been established that the outbreak was caused by a strain of the virus which only exists in a government laboratory located three miles away from the first reported case. This particular strain does not occur naturally outside the government-owned "Institute for Animal Health" at Pirbright. The Pirbright facility is shared with a private American pharmaceutical company, Merial Animal Health, which manufactures vaccines for animal diseases such as FMD. The strain has now been conclusively linked to a vaccine that Merial manufactured on 16 July this year.
The UK government's spin doctors are already on the job, with news reports carrying the government Health and Safety Executive suggestions that contaminated water at the Merial laboratory may have been disposed of improperly with the recent flooding in the UK possibly carrying the disease to surrounding farmland, or perhaps the air-filtration system at the lab was not powerful enough to prevent the virus from escaping. In its initial inquiry, the government's Health and Safety Executive said there was a "strong possibility" that the virus came from the Government-licensed Pirbright complex and that it is likely that workers at the site were to blame for spreading the disease. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) last night said it would investigate unconfirmed reports that a worker at one of the Pirbright labs had an allotment near the farm where the outbreak was first detected on Friday.
In a statement today, a Merial spokesman denied responsiblity:
"Over the last three and a half days we have conducted intensive internal investigations and, as a result, continue to have complete confidence in our processes and procedures for health, safety and environmental protection, quality control, quality assurance and regulatory compliance.
The microbiology expert Hugh Pennington opined: "My impression is that they haven't found any technical fault and flooding is a potential, but only negligible. What you are left with is human movement."
So as usual, "Mr. nobody" was responsible, or some unnamed humans.
What is most interesting about this outbreak of FMD is that it comes hot on the heels of yet another appearance of the terrifying "bird flu", with 2 swans in France, a few ducks in Germany and 51 chickens in India all succumbing to the disease in recent weeks. Call me conspiratorial if you like, but I've been watching the modus operandi of the powers that be for too long now to take anything of this nature at face value, at least not before I subject it to the smell test. So let me share some finer details with you and you can then decide for yourself.
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