F&D - UPDATE 15

Dr. Richard North PhD. [UKIP]
Research Director EDD [European Parliament]
4th May April 2001
Have they now culled the truth? 

DAILY MAIL ARTICLE 

Certainly the graphs being handed out yesterday by Tony Blair's spin doctors to confirm his claim that the foot-and-mouth crisis will soon be at an end looked wonderfully reassuring. They show the epidemic plummeting down to a date when it is predicted the number of new cases will hit zero, which by purest coincidence happens to be 
June 7. 

But however convenient these figures may be to Mr Blair's election plans, the truth is they are scarcely worth the paper they are written on. 

There is now alarming evidence to show that, in the last ten days, MAFF has been using every trick in the book to ensure the statistics coming out of its computer all point in the correct downwards direction. 

The key statistic, in political terms, is that daily "headline figure" 
showing the number of new outbreaks. This is the one blazoned across every newspaper and television screen which in the past week has dropped neatly down into single figures. 

Measure this against a month ago, when the headline figure was running at up to 50 cases a day, and it can be seen how easy it is for Mr Blair and Alistair Campbell to claim the crisis is now all-but over. 

But we can now identify at least four ways in which, over the past two weeks, MAFF has deliberately changed the basis on which its figures are calculated - and in each case the effect of the change has been to keep that headline figure moving sharply down in the direction Mr Blair and Mr Campbell want. 

The first change has been to reclassify many cases which would earlier have been included in MAFF's headline figure under different headings, so they no longer have to be declared in the daily totals. 

Since the epidemic began, the current declared total number of outbreaks is around 1550. But animals slaughtered on more than 1000 other farms have been classified under two separate headings, as "slaughter on suspicion" or "dangerous contacts", which has the supreme advantage of excluding them from that politically sensitive headline total. 

Another device which has had a similarly dramatic effect in reducing the epidemic curve has been the decision to include outbreaks only when these are subsequently confirmed by the government laboratory at Pirbright. 

This is particularly significant in the light of last week's startling 
admission by agriculture minister Nick Brown that no fewer than two thirds of the samples earlier taken from slaughtered animals had proved negative - in other words, the animals had been perfectly healthy when killed. 

The figures under the new system may now be more accurate. But it is obviously absurd to compare them against those earlier figures which, on Mr Brown's own admission, were inflated by up to 200 percent. What this means is there has been nothing like the drop in numbers of outbreaks that government graph is suggesting. 

It also emerged last week that MAFF has abandoned testing for foot-and-mouth in the huge numbers of sheep it is still slaughtering under its so-called "contiguous cull" policy, whereby it kills animals within "3 kilometres" of an infected farm. 

This too must have had a dramatic effect on the figures, since many of these animals will be infected. But they too have now conveniently dropped off Mr Blair's radar. 

However the oddest new policy of all seems to be MAFF's extraordinary new reluctance to confirm cases of the disease even when local vets are sure that animals are infected. No new case can be confirmed unless approved by a committee of vets at the 
ministry's London head office in Page Street, Westminster - and unttil 
recently the ministry seemed happy to approve slaughter on the slightest suspicion. 

But reports from various parts of the country, including Cumbria, Devon and Essex, now suggest that vets are having enormous difficulty in persuading Page Street that animals they suspect of being infected are genuine cases. 

This appears to be another dramatic change in policy, which may also help to explain why the number of officially confirmed outbreaks is apparently dropping so fast. 

The alarming truth is that the Government has now stealthily changed the basis on which its figures are calculated in so many different ways that it is simply no longer possible to make meaningful comparisons with figures from earlier stages of the epidemic. 

Thus no one, not even the Government itself, now really has any idea whether the figures are falling or rising, and whether the epidemic is genuinely under control or not. The real fear must be that, in manipulating the figures to show that the epidemic will be all-but over by his chosen election date, Mr Blair may be taking the most fearful gamble of his premiership. 

He is hoping that, at least until June 7, it will be possible to convince the electorate that his policies for controlling the worst outbreak of 
foot-and-mouth in history have been a triumphant success. 

But even he knows there is a high risk that, as millions of dairy cows come out from their winter quarters onto summer pastures, those cattle may pick up the disease from grass infected by sheep which have been grazing there for months. 

Mr Blair almost admitted this at yesterday's press conference, when he said there was still a chance of an upturn in the figures later in the summer. 

And if foot-and-mouth were to spread widely into Britain's 11 million cattle, as more than one farmer has observed in recent weeks, then "we really shall be facing Armageddon". 

But by then, Mr Blair must be hoping, he will have already achieved his overriding purpose - to get safely back to Number 10. 

And if by any chance his gamble doesn't come off and the disease does spread into the dairy herd, he even already has an excuse to hand to explain why such a disaster was not his fault. 

"We tried to persuade those farmers to agree to vaccination of their cattle" we shall be told, "but they simply wouldn't accept it. If only the NFU had listened, this awful new disaster could have been avoided. But now they have no one to blame but themselves". 

If only Mr Blair and Mr Campbell were as clever at running the country as they are in driving their spin machine, they might almost deserve to be re-elected. 

ends 

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