F&D - UPDATE 11

Dr. Richard North PhD. [UKIP]
Research Department EDD [European Parliament]
25 April 2001
Confused? We all are!

Confused? We all are! 

By any measure, the case for vaccination has been long proven. Politically, it seemed the most appropriate (and necessary) response to head off what might still be an explosive upsurge in outbreak reports over the next few weeks, as cattle are turned out to grass. 

Why then agriculture minister Nick Brown should, on Monday, have told the House of Commons Agriculture Select Committee that "The case for vaccination recedes as the number of daily cases declines" is, on the face of it, inexplicable. The need for vaccination is not so much determined by the current case rate, but the possibility of a break-out into the cattle population, and the pressing need for Blair to avoid having to make his June 7 election announcement against a backdrop of dead cows. 

Of the several possible explanations, one front-runner is that Brown - a captive of the NFU and his own Ministry, both of which are viscerally against vaccination - was simply launching a pre-emptive strike against Blair, boxing him into a corner and ensuring that he could not go ahead with a change in policy. 

But this must be seen against the backdrop of recent "pro-vaccination" messages being put out by the Ministry, including the sending of a letter direct to all livestock producers, putting the case for vaccination, over the head of the NFU. Clearly, within the Ministry itself, a battle has been played out and, perhaps temporarily, the "antis" have had their way. 

The key factor which appears to have turned the tide, however, is the run of signals from the Ministry and its coterie of tame scientists - not least Prof. David King, that notable expect on surface material chemistry - to the effect that the "outbreak" is under control. One can only surmise that the Ministry - and Blair by implication - have committed the one most important cardinal sin of politics, that of believing their own propaganda. 

Is the epidemic under control? 

When it comes to determining this all-important question, we are all totally reliant on the figures produced by MAFF, principally the daily count of what they insist on calling "cases" - but which are in fact outbreaks. But there are many good reasons for believing that the figures produced by MAFF are so distorted that the statistics are not worth the paper they are printed on. 

In the first instance, it was readily apparent that, from the very first time FMD was reported on 19 February, the disease was already widespread, particularly in sheep. It was also known that the number of vets employed to do the original contact tracing was very small - a figure of 217 has been mentioned - of which only a small proportion were actually engaged in tracking the disease (the others were occupied with slaughter and supervising disposal). 

Thus, irrespective of the actual prevalence of the disease, the number of outbreaks which could be reported would have been limited by the resource applied to detecting them. 

As the epidemic progressed, substantially more resources were applied to disease tracing, with the number of vets increasing to over the 1,000-mark. Some of the incidental work was hived off to the Army so proportionately more vets were involved in tracking the disease. With this massive increase in resource - given that the disease was by then already widespread - the number of outbreaks reported would have increased even if the epidemic had been on the wane. 

In other words, the rate of reporting and the incidence of the disease were independent variables. 

The outbreak reports, in themselves, were in any event distorted by a failure to distinguish between recently acquired an old infection. Some vets were remarking that, when they examined slaughtered out animals, from flocks recently discovered as infected, they were noting old, healed lesions in some animals, indicating that the infection had been introduced week or even months previously. But no distinction was made in the statistics between "old" infection newly reported, and genuinely new outbreaks of the disease. 

Then, as the epidemic appeared to peak, a different dynamic took over. To cope with the contiguous cull, an increasing number of vets, by then up to 14000, were withdrawn from proactive disease tracing, and more reliance was placed on reporting from farmers and their vets. With fewer vets thus engaged in looking for the disease, it is inevitable that less disease would be reported. 

Currently, and for the last two weeks, yet another dynamic has taken over. Up until then, it has been very evident that vets have been over-eager to diagnose foot and mouth, with outbreaks being reported on the basis of clinical judgements of ambiguous clinical signs by vets who have had no direct experience of diagnosing the disease. Many reports have been received of such diagnoses failing to be confirmed, when laboratory results come back negative. But there is now clear evidence that vets are increasingly reluctant to accept reports of disease and, even when they are satisfied, there are reports of them having difficulty in convincing MAFF headquarters to accept their diagnoses. Furthermore, many animals are being now slaughtered "on suspicion" which means that outbreaks are not reported unless or until laboratory confirmation obtained. 

Evaluating the effect of these distortions, a plausible case can be made for suggesting that, in the initial phase of the epidemic, outbreaks were being under-reported, in the next phase, they were being - proportionately - over-reported and, currently - by comparison with previous regimes, both under-detected and under-reported. 

Garbage in - garbage out 

Despite all these inherent distortions, much reliance is being placed on statistical evaluations being conducted by Prof. Roy Anderson and his team at Imperial College, Cambridge. They seem to be heedless of the caution known to all computer users who are entirely familiar with the acronym "gigo" - garbage in, garbage out. However sophisticated might be the computer models used, their results are entirely valueless if the input data are flawed. 

This much was recognised by Dr Paul Kitching from the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright in Surrey, interviewed on Channel Four News on Saturday 21st April. He remarked: 

"The modellers produced some very seductive graphs which would indicate the virus is going, what the disease outbreak is likely to be in the future. 

The problem has been that there's been such little epidemiological investigation into the outbreak that the data which the modellers really require to input their model hasn't really been available, and if there isn't good data going into a model, one has to question the value of the data coming out". 

He took the view that virtually none of the models had been able to predict had actually happened in the epidemic because there had not been the data input available, and there had not been the expert advice sought to feed into the models. There had not been a distinction between the different species affected with foot and mouth disease and how they would influence the model. There had been no recognition of the fact that the virus had been hidden in sheep for some time and that many farms had been infected for 6 or 7 weeks before they had been identified. 

Kitching added that, although these things had not been addressed by the modellers, the alarming thing was how the models seems to have influenced policy to such an extent. 

Quo vadis? 

So where do we go from here? If one was to be brutally frank, we have no idea of what is happening to this epidemic. Upbeat estimates from the likes of Prof. David King - the expert chemist - who told the Agriculture Select Committee today that there would be no more daily cases of foot-and-mouth by the time of the much-anticipated general election on June 7 are worth exactly as much as the data on which they are based - exactly nothing. 

The most essential tool in the management and control of any epidemic is accurate, up-to-date information. For various reasons, government is depriving itself of that tool and is being suckered into believing the epidemic is under control. 

It may or may not be - all epidemics eventually die out naturally - but, if it is not or we see a massive upsurge of outbreaks in cattle, so big that even the MAFF cannot massage the figures, then Blair will have been seen to take the most reckless gamble of his career. He may get away with it, but I would not put money on it. 

ends. 

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