Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 113)
WEDNESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2001
MR JIM
SCUDAMORE AND
MR ROY
HATHAWAY
Mr Breed
100. Has not the history of this whole lesson
to be learned some time ago been problematical? Just going back
in the history and looking at some research that has been done,
we had the Fellows Committee in 1912 following an outbreak who
said that in future we should consider inoculation for surrounding
farms; we had the Sir Ernest Gowers report in 1952-54 which said
that vaccination would be useful for severe epidemics, and then
we had the Northumberland Committee in 1969 saying that contingency
plans should include ring vaccination for the vicinity of any
outbreak. Is it not the fact that, after all those, we go back
and actually we do not take very much notice of that; each individual
outbreak is then looked at in isolation and we go through the
whole process again? What are we going to do this time, 100 years
possibly almost later than the original, which is actually going
to nail this once and for all?
(Mr Scudamore) Firstly, this is not a strictly veterinary
judgment. There are so many other issues that it is not a purely
veterinary issue. It is an economic issue, a rural issue, a whole
range of issues—many of which I am not competent to talk
about. What we also need to look at is what has happened in the
country and if you look at the UK outbreak we have had different
scenarios in different parts of the country. If we had done a
3 km vaccination around Northampton it would have been a complete
waste of time. We would have put resources into vaccinating and
not into control of disease. What we are going to have to look
at is what happened in different parts of the country. There are
other parts of the country like Cumbria and Northumberland where
the agriculture and the situations are entirely different, so
maybe we need to look to different control measures in different
parts of the country for different circumstances. In Cumbria and
Northumberland, for example, I believe there are lots of small
farms which are fragmented; people help each other out; there
is a lot more movement of people backwards and forwards; there
is stock on outlying land and there is an entirely different situation
to that you find in Cheshire, for example, where we eradicated
it very quickly. One issue is whether we adopt the same procedures
in every part of the country or do we have to do something different?
Secondly, if as a country we decided to vaccinate the whole of
Cumbria, would that have been acceptable to the farming community,
the retail community and everybody else? So the second issue is,
if we are going to have a policy of vaccinating in certain areas,
we need to have everybody brought into that policy. We need to
know the implications in terms of trade and tourism—and
even if we vaccinate and we still have disease there could be
an impact on tourism—what the impact on trade is—there
is a national impact on trade—and would it work? There are
a lot of issues in all of this which I do not think we can decide
now which need to be decided both in a UK context and in a European
Union context and in a world context. If we are looking to have
vaccination more routinely then we are going to have to look to
changing world standards for trade.
101. What you are saying is we ought to develop
contingency plans for the patterns of farming for different parts
of the country so when an outbreak occurs we have a contingency
plan which relates to the farming activity in the area in which
that outbreak has suddenly occurred?
(Mr Scudamore) That looks as though it is going to
be a particularly important aspect. There is no doubt that in
this outbreak we have not had one outbreak. To talk about "one
outbreak" is not very sensible. What we have had is about
thirteen outbreaks. We have had the Cumbria/Northumberland which
is very similar in terms of the farming patterns and in terms
of the way the outbreaks have spread; we have had the Devon outbreak
which is different again; we have had the smaller outbreaks round
the country and the way we handle each of those might be different
depending on, as you say, the type of agriculture, the way it
is spread, how people operate and what goes on in that part of
the country.
Mr Drew
102. On vaccination, surely the problem is that
people are trying to come up with a veterinary solution to what
is a multifaceted problem. It is an economic problem. In vaccinating
these animals there is going to be no return. It is going to cost
you more to vaccinate than you are going to get back from those
animals, and that should surely be the baseline from which we
are looking at this.
(Mr Scudamore) If you vaccinate the animals, the only
concern that international trade will have is whether there is
virus present in those animals or in the product of those animals.
If there is no evidence of that then I cannot see any reason why
trade cannot take place. What we really need to do, though, is
develop a system where we can vaccinate animals, we can separate
out vaccinated animals from infected ones, and demonstrate that
vaccinated animals do not carry the virus. If we can do that then
there would be no impact on trade but that comes back to research
and development and it comes back to the newly developing tests
which are coming on the market which need to be validated, and
we need to try and work out a system of eradicating disease using
vaccination. But you still come back to the question of what is
our objective? Is it to eradicate the disease using vaccination
or is it to live with the disease and just vaccinate?
Chairman
103. You mentioned tests and what matters, of
course, is how close are we to having a reliable test to identify
infection or infected animals whether they are vaccinated or not.
There has been an argument about this. Some people maintain that
we could have been using existing technology; other people say
the development has not been validated; it is not state of the
art; it has not been used on a large scale yet. Where are we on
this? How far away are we, in your judgment, from having this
instrument at our disposal which is going to make the argument
of a contiguous cull presumably redundant?
(Mr Scudamore) It would not unfortunately because
of the way the disease operates. There are two types of tests
we are looking at. The first one is to identify whether the animal
has antibodies to the vaccine or antibodies to the virus and those
tests are becoming available, and I see one of the companies has
put one on the market in the last month which will detect vaccine
antibodies against disease antibodies. That would be quite helpful
because if you vaccinated large numbers of animals you could then
screen them and say, "Well, that is vaccinated, that is infected",
and you could remove infected animals. But the second type of
test is to identify the virus in a quicker and more effective
way and these are the tests you are talking about using what is
called PCR technology which is a molecular technology looking
at the genetic material. Those tests are around but they need
to be validated, but with all these tests you have to look at
the disease and how it operates. If an animal becomes infected,
when would the virus be in the blood and when would the test pick
it up? If the animal is infected and it develops clinical disease
and excretes the virus, when can you pick that up? So whilst the
test might be available, the way in which they are used needs
to be validated otherwise you would get false positive and false
negative results. We would not want to use tests against the wrong
results because if it gave us false negative results and we said,
"It is all clear" we would leave infected herds; if
it gave us false positive ones then we would kill them unnecessarily.
But we do need to begin to use the new technology in the molecular
methods and there is no question that all these methods have to
be used. What we are looking into is whether they should be used
on the farm or in the laboratory; whether we use field tests or
laboratory tests.
104. There is an enormous difference between
the two.
(Mr Scudamore) The advantage of the laboratory test
is you could have standardised procedures; you know that the results
are uniform. The advantage of a field test is you can do it on
the spot and get an instant result. An ideal test would be a microscope
slide where you take a sample from the animal's mouth, put it
on the slide, and if it goes red it is positive and if it does
not go red it is negative. These are the sort of things we would
want to see.
105. But in the circumstances of an epidemic
taking Mohammed to the mountain must surely be rather more desirable
than the opposite?
(Mr Scudamore) Yes.
Mr Drew
106. Finally, is your problem not one of numbers
but of psychology? There was certainly a view expressed to me
by some TVIs about the quality of people in the State Veterinary
Service. I think they were quite unjustified but there has certainly
been for some time low morale in the SVS. Should we not properly
fund it and rebuild it?
(Mr Scudamore) That sounds very good!
107. That is a big issue, is it not?
(Mr Scudamore) We do have a service which is exhausted
at moment. We have been working since swine fever began in August
last year and I ought to pay tribute to our staff who have put
in a tremendous amount of work—
Diana Organ
108. Particularly those in Gloucestershire.
(Mr Scudamore) I think it applies everywhere—those
in Devon, those in Dumfries. They have done a tremendous job in
very unpleasant circumstances because no one likes doing the type
of work we do. There is a lot of criticism around which is increasing
about the way people operated, but I do think that people on the
ground have done a tremendous job and I am very grateful for the
thanks we get.
Mr Jack
109. There is an allegation today made by Evill
& Jones described as the country's biggest contractor of vets
that you were splashing cash about with gay abandon and pinching
all their people, and as a result it is said that the National
Audit Office are going to investigate your largesse with salaries
and the risks that were thereby created by moving all those vets
to fight foot and mouth with other areas of activities. Is there
any validity in this?
(Mr Scudamore) The responsibility for meat hygiene
lies with the Meat Hygiene Service so the delivery of all the
meat inspection and all the veterinary requirements in abattoirs
is the responsibility of the Meat Hygiene Service which is part
of the FSA. Evill & Jones are contractors who provide vets
to the Meat Hygiene Service so the first question is whether the
Meat Hygiene Service had any problems and, as far as I am aware,
I have not heard of any but they might have reported in through
other channels. I should also comment about the Meat Hygiene Service
who have also done a tremendous job in all of this. They have
picked up disease on a number of occasions; they have looked after
the cleaning and disinfectant in abattoirs; they have dealt with
all the controls on movements from farms to abattoirs, so they
have done a tremendous job. Evill & Jones provide contract
vets so it is up to the Meat Hygiene Service to decide whether
it has got enough vets or not and to make representations. On
the question of salaries, we pay a certain rate for TVIs working
normally with our staff, the people working on foot and mouth
disease, because we had to attract people to work for us and to
some extent it was supply and demand—we needed vets and
we had to pay to get them. So we pay them £250 a day. For
that we get from a lot of them 12-14 hours work a day in very
unpleasant circumstances, so I think they are paid a reasonable
amount for the job they do. A lot of them come from practice and
while they are helping us they have to get locums in to work in
the practice and they have to pay people to fill in the practices,
so I think the pay we are providing the TVIs who are not full
time employees—they are only going to be there while the
foot and mouth is on and then they will leave—is reasonable
in terms of supply and demand of what we need, and in terms of
vets in abattoirs that is the responsibility of the Meat Hygiene
service and it is up to them to make representations if they have
a problem.
110. So you would refute the observation in
this Financial Times press release by somebody who said this was
a "grotesque waste of public money"?
(Mr Scudamore) I would certainly refute that, yes.
Diana Organ
111. Obviously the eradication of disease was
at the forefront of your mind but the implications of the policy
did have a disastrous effect on tourism and many rural businesses,
and one of the things that really affected the downturn in tourism,
I suggest to you, was the vision that people had on their TV screens
of the massive funeral pyres. It looked medieval and barbaric;
it was extremely distressing for local people—particularly
young children going to and from school—to see them and
the smell was unbelievable for the days they were burning. Do
you think that in future, if we are going to have eradication
of the disease again, it can be successfully done using funeral
pyres like this? I understand that we obviously cannot use burial
in certain places because of the height of the water table after
flooding in the previous winter. Are we going to do this again?
It is so barbaric.
(Mr Scudamore) This is a major issue which I hope
will come out of the lessons learned. The question is, if you
have an eradication programme, how do you deal with the carcases?
We now have the hierarchy which includes rendering followed by
incineration, followed by landfill, followed by burning, followed
by burying, so the hierarchy for disposal of carcases would follow
that order. We would go for rendering first, followed by incineration,
followed by landfill, followed by burning, followed by burying,
so there is a hierarchy that we would use.
112. But in the rural areas of Devon and Gloucestershire
they were burning all the time.
(Mr Scudamore) The question there was whether it was
the very large pyres or the small pyres because there were two
different types. There were small ones on the individual farm
and the very big ones to get rid of backlogs. There is no doubt
that all of this needs to be looked at very carefully. If you
are going to have an eradication programme that involves disposal
of carcasses, you have to decide how you are going to dispose
of those carcasses safely and effectively. It does raise the question
of rendering capacity and whether that is sufficient for what
we need or whether we need more rendering capacity to link in
with the policy that we have. You raise a very important issue
on the disposal of carcasses. It is not an issue just for this
country, it is an issue everywhere. The reason the Dutch vaccinated
was to allow them to have an orderly throughput through rendering
plants, so the main reason they vaccinated was to enable them
to control the disposal of carcasses. Even countries where you
think there would not be a problem, like Australia, have a disposal
problem if they have a large outbreak. You are absolutely right
that we have not looked at the hierarchy, and if we are going
to have a policy like this we need to look at rendering, incineration
and landfill.
113. So the use of vaccination means that we
would not have to use burials so much and they would come much
lower down in the hierarchy because we would then wait for the
rendering capacity to become available?
(Mr Scudamore) One of the reasons we looked at vaccinating
as a contiguency method, particuarly in Humberside, was the sheer
volume of animals to be disposed of. One of the options if you
vaccinated is you can reduce the level of disease and if the policy
is to kill the vaccinated animals, you can control and organise
the rate at which you kill them and where you kill them. You might
even be able to kill them in abbatoirs and then dispose of them
through rendering plants. The disposal of carcasses and vaccination
are linked quite closely together, albeit the Dutch still had
an eradication programme where they used vaccination.
Diana Organ: Thank you. I just hope we do not
have to look at those pyres again.
Chairman: Mr Scudamore, Mr Hathaway, you have
had a very long session and we have covered an enormous amount
of territory. Thank you very much for coming. We will see you
from time to time as we have done in the past. This is one of
a series but it has been very helpful and we are very grateful
to you. There are one or two items you were going to let us have
information about. We have Professor King next week so we will
cover some of the same territory and we may cover a little diversion
to brains if he has produced his analysis by then. Thank you very
much indeed.
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