THE FOOT & MOUTH CRISIS
& THE PUBLIC HEALTH IMPLICATIONS

Open letter to the medical press

from Dr Richard Lawson:

The work done by farmers is fundamental to our lives. No food, no life. Period. The health services owe it to our farmers to help them in the present crisis. 

As rural GPs know, Britain's farmers are living under conditions of chronic severe stress, which has an impact on their physical and mental well-being. They are not the only group to be suffering, but using suicide as a crude index, they are among the most highly stressed groups in our society. To be faced with the loss of livelihood and animals which they care about, is an acute-on-chronic trauma.

Rural communities will suffer economically and socially from this crisis. At the very time when they need social support from their peers, some of them are isolated in their farms, afraid to meet in groups for fear of spreading the virus.

There is a physical health problem: smoke from the pyres is a source of dioxins, pesticides, particles, BSE prions, and probably of some FMD virus which has escaped heat inactivation.

The alternative is burial in lime pits, which have to be placed to avoid groundwater contamination. In a choice between two evils of its own creation, the Ministry should go for burial as the lesser, especially as it is a quicker method of disposal. Finally, the rotting corpses of slaughtered animals pose another physical and mental health hazard.

The health of rural communities will be affected by this disease and its bungled handling by Maff. Farmers ad rural communities need a speedy end to the current outbreak of Foot & Mouth disease (FMD). 

It behoves the medical profession to advocate the best way of extinguishing the disease in the shortest possible time. 

There are powerful arguments for vaccination as the best way of extinguishing the present outbreak. The resistance to vaccination on the part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food centres on the fact that using vaccination denies UK farmers access to foreign export markets.

This argument is deeply flawed :

•	We are in any case, net importers of meat 
•	The damage to tourism is far worse than the loss of export markets 
•	It is doubtful whether the "kill everything within 3 km" policy will cure the disease any quicker than vaccination, even with the 3-12 month quarantine period needed after vaccination withdrawal.

The Ministry is plainly incompetent. As those with care for the rural community, GPs and rural PCG/Ts should learn about the facts of the case, (www.sheepdrove.com is the place to start) and press the Government to cull its current crop of expert advisers, and bring in new advisers who are open to new, less heavy handed and damaging approaches to managing this disease.

Dr Richard Lawson
GP in North Somerset

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