We ought to be ready for foot and mouth this time

[Guest guest]

We ought to be ready for foot and mouth this time

Leader Sunday August 5, 2007 The Observer

Gordon Brown is reputed to be a workaholic and an obsessive planner.

Still, he could hardly have been expected to pack Professor Iain

's report on the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak for holiday

reading, just in case.

Fortunately, within hours of hearing news that the disease was back,

Mr Brown appears to have got his hands on a copy of that report. The

decision to postpone his holiday, impose an immediate national ban on

all livestock transportation and to cull every infected animal on the

farm at the centre of the outbreak show that some lessons from 2001

have been learnt.

Last time, ministers took too long to appreciate how disastrous a foot

and mouth epidemic could be. It was days before a national

transportation ban was imposed. By the time the government grasped

that it was in the middle of a civil emergency rather than a

veterinary incident, the virus was rampant and panic had set in.

Now ministers can look at various economic and political postmortems

from 2001 to inform their judgments. They also have vivid memories of

mounds of burning carcasses to remind them of the political cost of

failure...

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,2141947,00.html