PILES of smouldering carcasses and heaps of animals being bundled into graves provides a grim monument to the devastation wreaked by foot-and-mouth in just a few short weeks. But, as the death toll mounts, there are fears the graves could commemorate a disaster which is not just tragic, but also senseless.

From the start of the outbreak, the received wisdom has been that mass slaughter is the only way to contain the disease and stop it taking a hold on the nation's entire livestock. But, as each day sees the total of infected farms edge ever higher, pressure is growing for the Government to consider vaccination.

The Ministry of Agriculture's official position is that vaccination is still under consideration. The Government was given permission from the EU last month to vaccinate up to 180,000 cattle in the most densely affected areas of Devon and Cumbria.

But last week Tony Blair told the House of Commons the Government had decided against it, determined to pursue its aim of slaughtering affected animals within 24 hours.

Objections to vaccination centre on the difficulty of making it work and on the economic effects, with the prospect of losing vital export markets, but these arguments cut little ice with chairman of the Moorland Association, Sir Anthony Milbank.

Sir Anthony, who owns 6,000 acres at Barningham near Barnard Castle in County Durham, is acutely aware of the consequences for farmers if foot-and-mouth got onto the open moors, but is scathing of the refusal to look seriously at any policy other than slaughter. "It is rather like insisting on cavalry in the First World War," he says.

"A lot of what is being put about is not true. We would not necessarily lose our export trade and we would not necessarily have to slaughter everything once it has been vaccinated.

"I just can't understand why it has been decided that it is so necessary to slaughter everything. It is just slaughter, slaughter, slaughter, slaughter."

According to those who see a mass cull as the only solution, vaccination would see Britain's meat exports rejected by every foot-and-mouth free country, costing billions in lost sales. But, says Sir Anthony, a more selective vaccination programme could still be made to work.

"I think they could ring fence the hills and do it in a way that would satisfy the EU, so that it was a controlled vaccination. We don't want to just do it willy-nilly, it would have to be strictly controlled and planned across an area like the fells and everything vaccinated within that and monitored.

"We need to be able to turn round to the EU and say 'We have vaccinated every animal there and there has not been any foot-and-mouth here and there is no need to slaughter.'

"I'm sure there would be huge problems in instituting a vaccination programme and I'm not saying it would be an easy thing to do at all. It would be extremely expensive and it would probably cause a lot of hardship to the farmers but it would bring the thing to a speedy conclusion."

Although the Government's scientific advisers have remained firmly committed to the slaughter solution, a growing number of bodies are backing vaccination, including the Soil Association, which campaigns for organic farming, and Compassion in World Farming (CIWF).

CIWF director Joyce D'Silva says objections to vaccination come down to economics in the end. "Many other countries cope with foot-and-mouth by vaccinating," she says. "We think the slaughter of so many healthy animals is unnecessary.

"The reason they won't vaccinate is that they will lose their export market but they have lost it now anyway. They say the vaccines might not work but we have a lot more sophisticated vaccines now.

"Here we have a disease which is, by and large, not fatal to animals, although it is pretty nasty in cows, and we go around killing everything. The reaction is so illogical and the only possible reason for doing it is economic."

The NFU and its president Ben Gill have remained steadfastly behind slaughter as the best way of controlling the outbreak. But, while the need to keep farmers behind the Government's policy may help explain the determination to pursue the mass cull to the end, the NFU insists it is not just an economic argument.

Rob Simpson, NFU spokesman for the North-East, says they could, reluctantly, support limited vaccination as a firebreak, if this was recommended by MAFF's vets, but it could not be a long-term strategy. "It is not like a flu jab or a measles jab. The vaccination itself is not 100 per cent effective and it takes two weeks to become effective and for the animals to become immunised," he says. "During that time, there is the possibility the animal would pick up the virus and, if that happens, it will become a carrier and it could transmit it to other animals. Rather than creating a firebreak you are creating an area which is not safe."

He says the NFU also fears that switching resources into vaccination means they are being taken away from the slaughter programme, putting its success at risk at a time when there are signs, although slight, the fight against the disease is being won.

Even if the Government did decide to switch to vaccination, it can call on only half a million doses of vaccine, stored at the Animal Health Institute in Pirbright, meaning only a limited programme would be possible in any case.

But, while the NFU may try to downplay the importance of economics in supporting a slaughter policy, it is the crux for David Harvey, professor of agricultural economics at Newcastle University.

The best predictions so far suggest that up to five million animals, mainly sheep, will be slaughtered before the epidemic is brought under control. But this is a small proportion of the 45 million sheep, 11 million cattle and eight million pigs in the UK's agriculture industry.

Prof Harvey estimates that this outbreak could cost as much as £10bn, through lost exports, the effect on tourism and the knock-on impact on other businesses, although he says this is likely to be a gross over-estimate. But, he says, if Britain had followed a vaccination policy since the last major outbreak in 1968, it would have cost as much as £60bn by now, largely in lost exports. An epidemic every ten years would still leave us better off.

"If we vaccinate we haven't eradicated the disease, we would be immunising our livestock from it and we would have to do it once a year and every time there is a break-down and it flares up again," he says. "Even if we vaccinate there will be 16-17 outbreaks a year, it would have cost us at least £5bn a year to vaccinate and we would have lost £55bn worth of exports if we had done the vaccinations and nobody else had. It is far too expensive to try and live with this disease."

The UK has maintained a slaughter policy to deal with foot-and-mouth since 1892, and now is not the time to change it, Prof Harvey insists.

"The whole tendency around the world has been for countries to eradicate this disease," he says. "It is a nasty disease, and it is much better to be without it, and that involves killing livestock which has it."

What do you think?

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