This Is Bad

The Daily Mail is reporting that the latest British Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in Britain may have originated from a pharmaceutical laboratory located only three miles - upwind - from the site of the outbreak. The facility is, apparently, partially owned by an American company but also houses British government run operations, despite the initial lurid sentences in the report. The American company has, however, voluntarily shut down all production at the facility - which, ironically, was supposed to be producing vaccines for FMD.

An American pharmaceutical company appeared to be responsible for the foot and mouth outbreak in Britain.

Merial, which makes foot-and-mouth vaccines and has a laboratory three miles from the Surrey farm hit by the disease, dramatically agreed to stop production immediately.

The breakthrough came after Defra experts established that the strain of foot and mouth disease found in cattle at the infected farm at Wanborough is similar to the virus isolated in the 1967 outbreak in Britain.

'It is most similar to strains used in vaccine production, including at the Pirbright site shared by Merial and the Institute of Animal Health,' said a Defra statement, adding that this particular strain was used in a batch of vaccine made by Merial last month.

A Defra spokesman said the focus of an investigation would be that the virus was airborne.

Defra hopes that if the virus was inhaled only by the 64 cows which were culled at the farm, the outbreak may be contained and will not spread beyond a three-kilometre exclusion zone set up around the farm.

After the breakthrough in identifying the virus, Chief Veterinary Officer Debby Reynolds ordered that a new, single ten kilometre protection zone be created encompassing both the infected farm and the Pirbright complex.

You have to read pretty far down to find details about the British government activity at the facility. But there is a history of problems dating back to the 1950s there. Aside from the pointing fingers in the article, the troublesome bit about the whole report is that the virus might be airborne. That would be very bad news, indeed. (But I would not be too quick to rule out rodents, either.) Information on the Pirbright Institute can be found here.