Suspected human foot-and-mouth signals more tremors

LONDON - A slaughterman is suspected of having contracted foot-and-mouth disease.

The infection rarely strikes humans and is not serious when it does, but the news is bound to have repercussions for the tourist trade and the meat industry.

Television pictures of farm animals being burned on vast pyres as part of efforts to control Britain's eight-week foot-and-mouth epidemic have already had a disastrous effect on the tourist trade.

Many have cancelled trips to Britain this summer under the mistaken impression that they are at risk from mad-cow disease, which has caused the death of several dozen Britons, but has nothing to do with foot-and-mouth.

If tests confirm the presence of foot-and-mouth in the unidentified slaughterman from Cumbria - an area in northwest England hard-hit by foot-and-mouth - then this month's big public-relations drive by British tourist chiefs will have been seriously undermined.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's office was quick to try to draw a distinction between the dangers faced by slaughtermen and tourists.

"The position of a slaughterman is different from a tourist. They are handling animals which are infected. [This case] should not be allowed to affect tourism," said a spokesman.

The possible human case came on the day the Government admitted that the outdoor pyres used to dispose of farm animals were releasing amounts of the cancer-causing chemical dioxin into the atmosphere.

But however disastrous the signals sent abroad, foot-and-mouth is a mild disease in humans, say experts.

The only human case recorded in Britain was a farmer in 1966, during the nation's last outbreak.

"The general effects of the disease in that case were similar to influenza with some blisters. It is a mild, short-lived, self-limiting disease," the Ministry of Agriculture said.

The Food Standards Agency said the disease had "no implications for the human food chain."

Anybody contracting the disease would be unlikely to have done so by eating meat, but through close working contact with an infected animal.

- REUTERS

Herald Online feature: Foot-and-mouth disaster

World organisation for animal health

UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food

The European Commission for the Control of Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Pig Health/Foot and Mouth feature

Virus databases online