General background
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22. In 2001 the United Kingdom suffered an FMD epidemic that was one of the largest in history. According to a report by the National Audit Office 3, it took 221 days to eradicate, cost the country about £8 billion in total, and in containing the disease at least six million animals were slaughtered.
23. The Ministry responsible for dealing with FMD was the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which later became Defra. For ease of reference, throughout this report I shall refer to both as Defra.
24. At the time of the start of the FMD epidemic (in February 2001), it was lawful for licensed farmers to feed livestock on swill that had been processed in licensed premises. In reality ‘livestock’ meant pigs because these were the animals predominantly fed on swill. ‘Swill’ was waste food collected from restaurants and other catering establishments which could be used as feed for licensed feeders if it was cooked for one hour at a temperature not falling below 100 degrees centigrade or processed by an alternative method specified in the swill processor’s licence. This cooking process, usually done in large tanks with associated boilers, inactivated viruses, such as FMD, making processed swill safe to feed to livestock.
25. Almost from the start of the epidemic there were strong grounds for supposing that the FMD outbreak had been caused by feeding unprocessed waste food to pigs at Burnside Farm, Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland. Following a two-week consultation (concluding on 10 April 2001) on a number of proposals to ban catering waste from being fed to animals, Defra decided to introduce a ban on feeding meat related catering waste to pigs and poultry. This was done by statutory instrument on 3 May 2001, which came into force on 24 May 2001 to allow a three week phase-in period for alternative feeds to be introduced.
26. Later inquiries into the FMD outbreak, including that by Dr Iain Anderson (the Anderson Inquiry) suggested that, although it was not possible to establish for certain the cause of the outbreak, the first or ‘index’ case of FMD had probably occurred on Burnside Farm, and that the most likely cause of that case was that illegally imported meat infected with the FMD virus had been collected as waste and fed to pigs on the farm without being properly processed. The operators of this farm, two brothers, were licensed to feed processed swill to pigs; one of them was later convicted of the offence of feeding unprocessed swill (a decision was taken not to pursue the other brother as he was by then terminally ill).
3 The 2001 Outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease: Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General HC939 Session 2001-2002: 21 June 2002
