And A Bit Of Sanity

After posting the last item, in which the Daily Mail luridly asserted that an American company had been the source of the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in Britain, I pulled up the Telegraph. They are not making such a claim and instead are playing the story straight. The American company shares a complex with a British government-run facility that houses a lot of dangerous pathogens. The Telegraph does not assign blame to either facility just yet but notes that the American company has promised full cooperation with any inquiry and that the site manager is flying back from a family holiday immediately to assist.

A biosecurity failure at a research laboratory has been pinpointed as the likeliest source of Britain's foot and mouth outbreak.

An inquiry by scientists is centring on fears that the virus escaped from the Pirbright laboratory site in Surrey, the only centre licensed to work with the foot and mouth virus. It is feared that the virus, carried on the wind, infected cattle grazing in a field three miles away.

A private pharmaceuticals company, Merial Animal Health, which has been developing a foot and mouth vaccine, shares the Pirbright site with the government-funded Institute for Animal Health, which holds 5,000 strains of the virus. Officials have not ruled out the possibility that such a release of the virus was deliberate. Both centres, however, pride themselves on their tight security record.

Last night, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) confirmed that the strain found on the infected farm was not one that would normally infect animals. A spokesman said the strain was similar to a virus known as 01 BFS67, which was isolated in the 1967 foot and mouth outbreak.

The department said the strain was present at the institute and had been used in a vaccines batch made last month by Merial. The company, which is jointly owned by drugs giants Merck and Sanofi-Aventis, had agreed to halt production on a "precautionary basis", Defra said.

The strain is thought to be relatively mild - less virulent than the pan-Asian strain that swept the country in 2001.

The Pirbright Institute - the British government's part of the facility - houses more than 5,000 strains of deadly pathogens.

Other British media: The Guardian plays it straight.  The Times of London does not, they, like the Daily Mail hype the American company and barely mention the British government facility. But there are two telling passages:

Peter Ainsworth, shadow environment secretary, demanded an independent inquiry. “If it turns out to be true that the laboratory is the source, then it’s almost as if the government has infected its own stock. Serious questions must now be asked about how this was allowed to happen,” he said…….

……. The government institute has recently suffered funding cuts, condemned by members of the Commons science and technology select committee, which said it was suffering the “loss of key staff and skills”.

Something to really think about there.