Foot and mouth cases climb to 69

12.30 pm - By BEN RUSSELL Herald correspondent

LONDON - The foot-and-mouth crisis is continuing to spread across Britain, with 12 new cases confirmed today. Those cases, added to the 16 announced on Saturday, bring the total of farms and abattoirs affected by the disease to 69.

The new cases include a farm on Dartmoor, raising fears that the disease may spread to the open moorland where 46,000 cattle and sheep graze. Other cases were confirmed in Cornwall, Tyne and Wear, Devon and Dumfries and Galloway. More than 54,000 animals are now awaiting slaughter and another 10,000 could be culled.

The nine most recent cases were confirmed just hours after Richard Cawthorne, Britian's deputy chief veterinary officer, gave a cautiously positive assessment of the outbreak. He said: "The disease is not spreading by being transmitted directly or by wind-borne means. But it is still being distributed among sheep as the sheep are incubating it."

He would not predict when the disease might peak, but said farmers may see a fall in the number of new cases by the end of the week if controls on the movement of animals were effective.

Local authority officials have begun working to restart the meat trade. Nick Brown, the Minister of Agriculture, said 232 abattoirs had applied to process animals under the limited movement scheme, which allows farmers in areas unaffected by foot-and-mouth to slaughter their animals under tightly controlled conditions.

Most of the licences were due to be completed yesterday, opening the way for the first animals to be taken to slaughterhouses tomorrow.

Ministers said it was too early to say whether the failure of import controls was behind the outbreak although Maff officials have begun investigating whether illegal shipments of meat may have caused the outbreak. Baroness Hayman, the Food Safety minister, said the authorities were remaining "vigilant".

She said: "There is a heightened sensitivity at the moment and everyone is being particularly careful. The Food Safety Authority is stepping up checks on imported meat."

She added: "One of the reassuring things [about the outbreak] is although these case numbers are going up, the boundaries of infected areas are not changing dramatically. [New] cases tend to be in zones which are already controlled."

A suspected case of foot-and-mouth disease was reported yesterday in Lemvig, northern Denmark – the second possible case on the continent.

Like the case at a pig-farm in Diksmuide, near Ostend, in Belgium on Saturday, first tests on the suspect cow at the farm in Lemvig proved negative. The results of further tests will be known today.

French authorities continued to insist that reports of a possible case on a sheep farm in the Loire départment near Saint Etienne were inaccurate.

Feature: Foot-and-Mouth Disease epidemic