Human foot-and-mouth cases cleared

Hundreds of thousands of animals have been culled to try and stop the spread of the disease

LONDON, England -- A British farm worker feared to be the first person to contract foot-and-mouth disease amid the current livestock crisis has tested negative for the virus.

Three of eight suspected human cases of foot-and-mouth disease have proved false alarms, and Agriculture Minister Nick Brown indicated on Friday that Paul Stamper of Cumbria was one of these.

Stamper was splashed with fluid from a slaughtered cow as he helped move carcasses, creating a media storm when it was suspected he may have caught the mild disease which is usually confined to cloven-hoofed animals.

A spokesman for the Public Health Laboratory Service said the latest results meant it was now "very unlikely" that any of the eight people tested so far had foot-and-mouth.

However, he said that follow-up blood tests to check for the presence of viral antibodies would now be completed two weeks after the illness was first suspected in each case.

There is only one previous case of someone in the UK contracting foot-and-mouth with agricultural salesman Robert Brewis suffering from the disease in 1966, shortly before the last major epidemic.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands farmers caught up in the crisis have been protesting at what they believe to be low levels of foot-and-mouth compensation brought chaos to roads across the country.

AUDIO British Agriculture Minister Nick Brown: Delighted that tests were negative 192kb/17secs. AIFF or WAV sound

A total of 26 cases have been confirmed on farms in the Netherlands compared to nearly 1,500 in the United Kingdom where the virus first broke out in late February. France has recorded two cases and Ireland one.

Dutch cattle and pig farmers blocked roads and halted traffic in 10 towns across the country on Friday in their call for more compensation, the Traffic Information Centre told the Reuters news agency.

At Amersfoort in central Netherlands about 50 tractors took to the roads in a go-slow, while in the east of the country traffic was backed-up for up to nine kilometres (five miles) on the A1 between Apeldoorn and Henglo.

Pig farmers, flouting a court ruling against demonstrations in the south of the country, handed out leaflets which criticised their Agriculture Minister Laurens Jan Brinkhorst.

"Brinkhorst is not making good his promises," they said. "He has abandoned the pig farmers in this crisis."

They also said the government had not acted quickly enough to solve the livestock welfare problem which affects cloven-hoofed animals.

Farmers want to quit

Back amid the devastated agricultural sector in Britain, a survey for trade magazine Farmers' Weekly found that a third of British farmers said they would scale back or quit the industry as a result of the effects of the virus on their livelihood and stock.

More than one in three of the 128 farmers whose farms had been hit by the outbreak and who had been interviewed in the survey said they planned to downscale their businesses.

Six percent planned to leave the industry altogether -- three times the normal number -- while fewer than half expected their businesses to recover in the near future.

Almost half of those questioned thought the government had given them adequate compensation for slaughtered livestock.

Brown said he understood why those in their 50s nearing retirement would want to sell up.

"Frankly, I don't blame them for thinking about that," he said.

UK eases cattle cull
April 26, 2001
Foot-and-mouth symptoms in humans
April 24, 2001
Foot-and-mouth: UK man feared ill
April 24, 2001
Foot-and-mouth cases rise
April 22, 2001
New human foot-and-mouth scares
April 25, 2001
UK urged to end cattle slaughter
April 21, 2001

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