Over The Gate By Jeff Swift

9:30am Friday 12th October 2001

Vaccination against foot-and-mouth hasgenerated a great deal of debate over the past eight months orso.

I, like many if not most farmers, have not felt able tocome up with strong views either for or against.

This issimply because we did not really know enough about it to be able tocorrectly weigh up the advantages and disadvantages as we didn't all knowwhat they were.

I do not criticise people for advising farmersto be either for or against vaccination.

What I do criticise,however, is not being given the full facts about its use and a statementof the pros and cons by recognised world experts.

Each andevery livestock farmer keeping cloven-hoofed animals should have beenfurnished with such a statement in the early days so that they could atleast make their own mind up as to whether they favoured a policy ofslaughter, vaccination or a combination of the two.

Forinstance, the "talk" was of vaccinating cattle only, notsheep.

Whatever I might think about vaccination, to onlyvaccinate cattle would have been wrong.

The NorthumberlandReport, produced after the 1967 outbreak by a committee chaired by theDuke of Northumberland with people like Henry Plumb, now Lord Plumbputting their name to it, contained several recommendations for dealingwith the disease in the future.

Among these recommendationswas the continuation of the slaughter policy, but that this should bereinforced by a ring vaccination scheme if a meat import policy,calculated to reduce substantially the risks of primary outbreaks, werenot implemented.

In other words, a policy which consisted ofboth slaughter and vaccination, namely a combination.

It wasonly about a month ago that I discovered this recommendation of theNorth-umberland committee, so, knowing what I now know and after weighingup the pros and con, I could be persuaded that this would have been theright policy.

But, of course, I did not know the full factsuntil I did my research.

With ring vaccination you begin atthe perimeter of the areas, progressing inwards towards thecentre.

To be successful, diagnosis, typing of virus and thevaccination itself must all be speedy.

For information aboutthe vaccine and also its likely effects, I take as my authority theclinical virologist Dr Ruth Watkins who also has a sheep farm in theBrecon Beacons, who in turn gleaned information from Prof Fred Brown, DrsPaul Sutmoller, Simon Barteling and Paul Kitching (world wide experts onfoot-and-mouth disease).

The vaccine is a killed (inactivated)one.

It induces immunity but does not infect the vaccinatedanimal.

This type of foot-and-mouth vaccine has been used for40 years and is well tested in the field.

The Dutch haveproved this to us as they used vaccination in and around infected premisesand five days later had no further outbreaks.

Hundreds ofmillions of vaccinated animals have been eaten in Europe and billions ofgallons of milk have been drunk.

This still happens and Iunderstand that twice vaccinated meat is imported from SouthAmerica.

Apparently, there is no veterinary reason toslaughter vaccinated animals.

I remember being told thatvaccinated animals had to be slaughtered - it looks like that was amyth.

I will continue my research and report my findings toyou next time.

l Meanwhile how about "Ulert" for this week'sdialect word - it means barn owl, with a possible origin from the Welsh "Hullard".

l Thought for the day: Science has not yetdiscovered how the birds know exactly when we washed ourcar.