London — Facing a revolt from some farmers opposed to killing apparently healthy animals to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, the government's chief veterinarian promised Monday to work on improving communications with livestock owners.
Jim Scudamore, Britain's top veterinarian, met farmers, vets and officials in Cumbria, the northwestern English county that has been clobbered by the fast-spreading disease.
"We have got to improve communication, particularly with the farming communities in Cumbria," Scudamore said after the meeting. He added that he was unsure when the pre-emptive cull of apparently healthy animals would begin.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, Belgium, Britain's agriculture minister sought to assure his European Union colleagues Monday that his country was doing all it could to stop the foot-and-mouth outbreak ravaging British livestock from spreading across mainland Europe.
"I'm going to ... make it absolutely clear that we're going to confine this disease to Great Britain, isolate it and exterminate it," Nick Brown told reporters as he arrived for the two-day EU meeting.
Six cases of foot-and-mouth were found in cattle on a farm in northwest France last week, but the continent has been largely spared so far.
Elsewhere in the world, Saudi Arabia has confirmed 400 cases of foot-and-mouth disease, the Ministry of Agriculture said Monday. The disease was first confirmed in Saudi Arabia earlier this month and has spread quickly among imported cattle.
In Britain, National Farmers' Union representative Peter Allen said the government needed to move faster, with diagnosis, confirmation and slaughter taking place within 24 hours. Some farmers complained of dead animals left to rot in fields for a week or more before being incinerated or buried.
In the four weeks since the first case was confirmed near London, nearly 300,000 animals have been killed or marked for destruction, Deputy Chief Veterinarian Martin Atkinson said Monday.
That is already two-thirds of the number of animals killed in Britain during a 1967 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, Atkinson said.
The government announced last week that it planned to destroy all sheep and pigs within two miles of any confirmed outbreak in Cumbria and southern Scotland, where many of the cases are concentrated. Animals that had come in contact with any animal that passed through markets known to have the infection were also marked for destruction.
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