Science - Colin Tudge on whether the foot-and-mouth virus can be halted by vaccination
Nick Brown's decision to consider a programme of vaccination against foot-and-mouth is not just an ad hoc veterinary tactic. It is a radical shift of policy with huge implications, and it is absolutely right. But we must now make sure not to lose momentum. This epidemic has demonstrated, as has BSE, what many have been saying for decades: that present-day agriculture in Britain, and increasingly in the world at large, is ill-conceived; that it has unrealistic and dangerous goals; that it is run on a wing and a prayer. If this virus truly prompts the reforms that are needed, or at least sets the ball rolling, all of us - and especially, in the long term, the much-beleaguered farmers - should be grateful to it. It is an ill wind.
Vaccination against foot-and-mouth is not a panacea: it will not halt the epidemic overnight, and will raise huge problems of its own. Broadly speaking, the vaccines are of two main types, made from either dead viruses or live but attenuated (weakened) ones. The former do not provide permanent immunity, and the latter, though more effective, introduce the very organism they are designed to curtail. Either type may suppress symptoms, so it can be hard to distinguish infected animals from vaccinated ones; therefore, in principle, vaccinated animals are a danger to those that are still vulnerable. Vaccination v non-vaccination thus makes the difference between insularity and international trade. There is a twist, too: viruses vary, and vaccines should be specially tailored yet available in large quantities when needed; but how can any country stockpile a vaccine against a virus that it hopes will not appear at all, and which, if it does, may take a new form?
Clearly it is better to keep the virus out altogether - which is what most countries now contrive to do when at all possible. Only a relative minority of the big players, such as India, are more or less obliged to put up with it. Nick Brown was absolutely right to cling to a policy of total exclusion for as long as was tenable. In the same way (although not quite for the same reasons), Britain has contrived for the best part of a century to exclude, totally, the rabies virus.
But there, unfortunately, the parallel stops. Because the rules against rabies, until recently, were frenetic: quarantine, scare campaigns (quite rightly), heavy penalties and public opprobrium for the smugglers of pets. To suggest that Britain's exclusion of foot-and-mouth has been perfunctory would be flattering. The New Zealanders warn and warn again that they will reduce you to penury if you enter their country with a watercress sandwich, but anyone can smuggle into Britain a hairy hoof or two from the furthest reaches of Africa or Asia and - astonishingly - a great many people do. Our joined-up government has not, apparently, introduced its veterinary service to the ladies and gentlemen of Customs and Excise. But you really cannot combine a whiter-than-white policy of asepsis with free-for-all trade and leaky airports. You really cannot.
Once the viruses have entered Britain, they are given every possible assistance: whisked by lorry from one end of the country to the other in hours, as their hoofed and hairy hosts are shuttled from rearing to fattening and on to the dubious privilege of centralised slaughter, exchanging gossip and pathogens with hundreds of other happy sheep and cattle as they go, trucked in from all other parts of the country like children to summer camp. It is lunacy, the absolute opposite of what was once meant by good husbandry.
A catalogue of lessons emerges from all this. To begin with, parasites - viruses, bacteria, worms, prions, protozoans, the whole biological underworld - are serious, and good at what they do. Officials with clipboards will not keep them out, however reassuringly their nylon hats may gleam. Buckets of disinfectant will not stop them. The science of ecology did not truly come of age until ecologists realised how great is the role of parasites in nature, and wrote them into their food-webs. Antibiotics gave us a few decades of respite against bacteria here and there, but microbes play a long game and they haven't finished with us yet. The attitude of industrialised agriculture to parasites is generally terrifying.
Why have we put up with such nonsense? Because it's cheap. And . . . but no: that's it. There is nothing more to add.
So what is to be done? A rethink from top to bottom is the answer: questions such as "How many animals does Britain really need, and why?" would be on the list (the answer being "Not many, but we should treat them and their producers well"). In the end, the many shortcomings of industrialised agriculture are issues of biology. There are many excellent biologists in this country, but if you want to get on, and get grants, then it is better to play the game, and the game is commerce, of which government is an employee. When you boil down the facts, it's all so horribly obvious.
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