ELIZABETH PIPER, London | Friday
WAS Babe the Pig responsible for Britain’s latest farming crisis? Or a smuggler? Or a tourist? British agricultural authorities searching for the source of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak that has set off a world ban on exports of British livestock and animal products have refused to rule out any theory.
The search for the cause of Britain’s first outbreak of the disease in 20 years takes in homes in the Essex commuter belt near London where families keep pet pigs.
”Someone could have been on holiday and brought it back,” said a representative for the National Pig Association, adding that a popular destination was South Africa, where foot-and-mouth disease reared its head earlier this month just after the government had lifted earlier controls.
Officials say the disease, which causes blisters in the mouths and on the feet of hoofed animals, knows no boundaries and can be spread through the air, or transmitted through urine, milk, semen or saliva. It makes working out where it came from very difficult, they say.
Since the popular 1990’s Hollywood film Babe, and its sequel, the number of people who regard pigs as pets rather than farm animals has risen sharply.
Babe”, a favourite with children moviegoers, told the story of a pig who was raised as a sheepdog after losing its mother and went on to fame in the world of humans.
The Agricultural Ministry representative said scientists were spending time isolating the strain of the virus, which is likely to be type O – a pan-Asiatic strain that has been seen recently in Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Russia, the Middle East and South Africa.
Britain suffered its last outbreak in 1981, when it was dealt with quite quickly.
”There is still the possibility that it could have simply floated in across the Channel because that apparently happened in the 1981 outbreak,” she said.
”But it is more likely to be some form of imported product. We are confident it was illegally imported, we don’t believe there was any legal route for an infected product to come in.”
While vets, epidemiologists and other officials combed the countryside for the source, farmers in the region were worried that the movement restrictions would kill off some of their businesses just as they recover from the mad cow crisis. – Reuters