Britain's Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, has proposed a UK ban on swill feeding as part of efforts to curb the foot and mouth outbreak. During a speech to the House of Commons, Mr Brown said that the task of tracing the cause of the outbreak, which has resulted in 666 cases so far, has been hampered by unrecorded sales which occurred on the edges of livestock markets without passing through the books.
He said that the likely source of the outbreak was a farm at Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland. He said that the farm was licensed to feed swill to pigs, but added that investigations were continuing and did not comment on whether the use of pigswill was the cause of the outbreak. Commenting on how the infection entered the UK, Mr Brown said that one possibility was through illegal commercial imports of meat. Another possibility was that the infected produce might have entered as a personal import.
A report in the London Times today identifies contaminated meat smuggled into Britain from the Far East as the most likely source of the epidemic. Quoting an official report, it said that some infected meat, probably illegally imported, went to an unidentified Chinese restaurant in Northeast England. The waste from the food served at the restaurant then ended up in pigswill, which was fed to pigs at the farm in nearby Heddon-on-the-Wall that has been traced as the source of the outbreak in Britain.
However, the pig farmer who runs a Heddon-on-the-Wall farm in Northumberland, one of the first to have a confirmed case, said that the British government's suggestion that swill was responsible for the outbreak was a "smokescreen". Bobby Waugh, who has more than 40 years' experience in the pig industry, said that he was confident the outbreak had not started at his farm in nearby Northumberland. Mr Waugh, who is licensed to collect and process swill, said that despite publicity surrounding his farm he has yet to be interviewed by either ministry officials or Northumberland County Council about the outbreak.
He said that he has been treating swill and feeding pigs for more than 25 years since new regulations were introduced in 1974 and has never had a problem. "I honestly don't think I am at the heart of this," he said.
A suspected case has been reported in Denmark this evening in a herd of cows. Results of laboratory tests are expected late tomorrow.
In another development, the mass burial of condemned livestock began in Cumbria yesterday. Thousands of carcasses were dumped in huge pits at a disused airfield. It is reported that 70,000 infected sheep and 200,000 apparently healthy animals will be disposed of there as part of a pre-emptive cull to prevent the spread. The wider cull is to begin tomorrow once sufficient transport and slaughtermen are in place.
