Farm leaders raise questions over the effectiveness of vaccination
Prevention
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Your support makes all the difference.Time is of the essence in deciding whether to start limited vaccination. If the Government does decide to go ahead, the programme would certainly begin with 200,000 cattle in north Cumbria being kept indoors at the moment to reduce their risk of infection.
Time is of the essence in deciding whether to start limited vaccination. If the Government does decide to go ahead, the programme would certainly begin with 200,000 cattle in north Cumbria being kept indoors at the moment to reduce their risk of infection.
Doing that requires expensive feed so farmers want to release them on to fields at the end of the month. But that would surely mean more cases of the disease, and so ministers, farmers and scientists are arguing over the problems of vaccinating all those animals, and especially about whether doing so would shorten or extend the life of the epidemic.
The small-scale vaccination being proposed in Cumbria and Devon, where there are also overwintering cattle, would not substantially delay the restart of animal and food exports from Britain. The proposals now being considered would count as "regional" vaccination which does not affect areas where vaccination is not used.
Once vaccinated, each animal would take about a week to develop immunity. The Institute of Animal Health in Purbright, Surrey, which is a world centre of expertise in the disease, has more than 500,000 doses of vaccine against the present strain of foot-and-mouth.
"Distributing them would not be a problem," said Dr Alex Donaldson, head of the laboratory, yesterday. "But the Ministry of Agriculture and the farmers need to get their act together if they want to get vaccination done by the end of the month."
Farmers, represented by the National Farmers' Union (NFU), have raised questions about the effectiveness and efficiency of such a move.
Richard Macdonald, director general of the NFU, said: "We are opposed to it. The Government has indicated that the current culling policy is working. Vaccination would only be an adjunct to culling, and only on animals already inside the affected areas it would not be used as a 'firebreak'. None of the scientific advice is suggesting the 'firebreak', and still less a national programme.
"While culling and burning is unpleasant, it does appear to be working. We've gone from 40 cases a day to 17 now. Some of the animals that would be in line for vaccination are surely incubating the disease. Those infected and then vaccinated would become carriers. That might prolong the disease because it would keep being spread by those animals."
Vaccinated animals, like infected animals in the earliest stages of contraction, would show no symptoms, but would have antibodies to the disease in their blood. Tests exist to discern between the two, but Dr Donaldson said they had not been comprehensively proved. "It would be very laborious to discern [between infected and vaccinated animals]," Dr Donaldson said. "With a fully validated test, you might only have to test between 1 and 5 per cent of a herd to get a profile of how all its animals are affected. With these, you would have to test 80 to 90 per cent of the herd to see which were infected and which were vaccinated."
Vaccinated animals could not be exported; nor could their milk. But in theory at least, they could be sold for domestic consumption. "There is no risk to human health from a vaccinated animal," Dr Donaldson said.
Such limited vaccination would not delay any application by Britain to restart animal and food exports to the European Union and the rest of the world.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food confirmed yesterday that such a measure for which permission was obtained weeks ago from the EU's Standing Veterinary Committee would come under a "regional" use of vaccination. Other parts of the country, where no vaccination was done, could begin exporting again three months after the last confirmed outbreak. Areas where vaccination was used would have to wait for at least six months.
The argument is whether the work of testing to distinguish disease-free, vaccinated animals from infected, vaccinated ones would outweigh any benefit of vaccination.
But those involved have only hours to decide before it will be too late. Once the cattle are turned out, even limited vaccination will not be a viable option even if it might have lowered the numbers of animals killed, shortened the epidemic and improved Britain's image to potential tourists.
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