A farmer's worst nightmare realised

By MICHAEL McCARTHY

Paul Cheale, a pig breeder and abattoir owner, woke up to a farmer's worst nightmare yesterday when he found his Essex property at the centre of Britain's first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease for 20 years.

His Cheale Meats Abattoir at Little Warley, near Brentwood, was doubly surrounded - by the yellow-and-black isolation tape of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and by TV crews and journalists wanting to know what had happened.

Cheale looked shaken and could not keep the tremor out of his voice when he emerged to give his version of events. "We are devastated," he said. "It is a real tragedy - the farming industry has been through BSE and swine fever and now we are faced with this."

The disease was found in pigs which had been awaiting slaughter at his abattoir, after being brought from farms in Buckinghamshire and the Isle of Wight. It has also been found on neighbouring Old England farm, which Cheale owns.

The area is at the edge of Greater London, on the featureless south Essex flatlands, but the abattoir takes animals from all over the country.

"On Monday we slaughtered 722 pigs, as is normal," Cheale said. "But we have a vet here all the time, and it was noticed that some animals were not quite right. We stopped the slaughter because we suspected it was swine vesicular disease - the symptoms are exactly the same as foot-and-mouth. Now as far as we know it's definitely foot-and-mouth, and all of the stock and all of the meat will be destroyed. Yesterday we slaughtered the remainder of the animals - 284 pigs and two cattle."

He now faces an intensive cleaning operation, involving the sterilisation of his premises, before he can even think about operating again, and yesterday he was trying to work out what it will mean to him financially - as this morning the whole UK farming industry will be doing. "It's obviously going to be expensive - it's going to cost tens of thousands of pounds," he said. "We are talking about hundreds of tonnes of meat being destroyed.

"We do get compensation, but we don't get compensation for loss of production. The key question is - where did it all come from? It obviously came from an animal somewhere, but we don't know where."

Exclusion zones and checks were going on yesterday around the two farms which supplied Cheale Meats.



The anxiety the outbreak has provoked in Essex was evident in speaking to a neighbouring farmer, Scott Norris, who has 1000 young pigs in a rearing unit about 2km away - well within the 8km no movement zone that has been established around the abattoir.

"We've not seen any problems as yet, and if it's able to be nipped in the bud and doesn't spread, it will all be over very quickly," Norris said. "But it will be of great concern if it spreads. It's obviously a nervous time. It's a very contagious disease.

"We have had such a poor economic time with problems here and imports coming into our traditional markets, and disease problems have simply added to it." Last year the industry was hit by an outbreak of classical swine fever in East Anglia.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT