Those of you in the UK can't have failed to notice that we've had Foot and Mouth Disease back in the last month. I was alerted to this fact while trying to enjoy a BBQ at a friend's on a Friday evening on call by the arrival of a text message from a colleague. It's one of those bits of news you just don't want to hear, even now that I'm not a mixed practice vet any more.
Anyway, it's a testament to the speed and thoroughness of the response, this time, that things seem to be under control, and we got (yet another, very keen they've been) fax today from Animal Health letting us know that movement restrictions are now being essentially removed and that we can soon export meat to the EU again. So, good work all around.
The outbreak seems to have been halted with only two premises finally confirmed infected with FMDV strain 01/BFS67, a strain of foot and mouth disease which was responsible for the 1967 UK outbreak but which has not been seen circulating in livestock or wildlife anywhere in the world for several years, living out a peaceful retirement as a reference strain in bottles in a number of research laboratories, and with a sideline in vaccine production.
Except.
[And the rest of this piece is pure speculation, and comes with a *humungous* caveat, which is that I have no real idea what the procedure for confirming FMDV is, other than that samples are taken on suspicion and a day or two later a press release comes out from DEFRA saying 'confirmed' or not. The difficulty with FMDV is that several other disease of cattle, sheep and pigs, such as Mucosal Disease, and Vesicular Stomatitis, mimic the clinical signs of FMDV very closely, so that suspect cases actually come up more often than people would expect. If the procedure is a good robust one with multiple samples sent to multiple labs for cross-checking, then the following isn't really at all likely. But I just have a slight worry that what happens is that the samples taken are sent off to one VI (veterinary investigation) lab somewhere, possibly even Pirbright, where one technician or scientist, or small group of technicians, whose job it is to process suspect FMDV samples, get on and do their jobs. In which case...]
There are two possibilities here, and I think the second deserves at least a passing glance. The first and apparently accepted story is that, somehow, despite the biosecurity precautions at the Pirbright Institute for Animal Health, and at the vaccine plant operated by Merial on the same premises, some of virus strain 01/BFS67 was allowed to escape, and somehow came into contact with cattle and caused the outbreak.
But isn't it just possible that, if suspect samples are tested in one place, by one group, perhaps even with the same batches of reagents, that the two 'confirmed' results are in fact the result of contamination of the samples with a reference strain inside the laboratory? Just a *little* possible? After all, modern analytic processes like PCR can be exquisitely, painfully sensitive. And contamination in labs with reference material has certainly been known to produce false positives in the past.
Anyway, I'm sure the clever people who are paid to think about these things have considered this, and ruled it out. But it occurred to me in an idle moment and brought me up short, so I thought I'd share it with you all. Not so much a conspiracy theory as an incompetence theory, I suppose. And as my Gran would have reminded me, you should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by carelessness or stupidity.
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