Foot and Mouth Disease

A discussion of the role that computer’s play in climate science (here) yielded an interesting contribution from Philip Ferguson that suggested that there might be similar problems in other fields.

Philip Ferguson
Foot and Mouth, in my opinion, is endemic at a low level when its symptoms are flu like and very rarely get to be seen in the latter stages of aggressive blistering.
Just before foot and mouth “broke”, farming was on it’s knees and the value of an old ewe was virtually nil. I believe that in response to the NFU lobbying for a compulsory cull or purchase arrangement to reduce supply and stimulate demand, the government saw this as an accounting ploy to get compensation from the EEC.
An outbreak was located by ministry vets and reported as such. Having invoked EEC “Enzootic epidemic” force majeure criteria under EEC rules the government then sat back and expected a controllable outbreak from which livestock would be culled and compensated for out of EEC funding.
What happened was that the election made the treasury extremely generous with their valuations in order to prevent disgruntled rural voters and the computer made the uptake uncontrollable.
As soon as the Foot and Mouth valuations appeared on the website (as opposed to being mere pub talk) the £90 on offer was taken up by any farmer who had an elderly flock with some ewes being worth 90 times more than a non-F&M valuation. This spread like wildfire among farming circles and farmers put up their hands like a forest to say “Please sir, I think I may have foot and mouth”.
There were no vets who were prepared to risk their professional indemnity by stating that suspected animals they went to see categorically did not have foot and mouth and some of them also had outstanding bills within the ailing farming industry that needed to be paid.
It then became a mad rush to transform pre-Foot and Mouth values into post Foot and Mouth compensation, and the computer induced this panic. It became addictive and the computer could tell you how close it was to you and I remember logging on every morning to watch the shape of the graph in a sort of voyeuristic frenzy.
If the computer had not been available (and surprisingly there is so much paperwork in farming that 60% of farms do have one)common sense would have made farmers question what was happening and the speed at which the financial carrot was taken up would have been much slower and the countryside would not have been littered with burning piles of carcasses.

Finally the computer makes everything very personal. It is the ultimate readers Digest type “you have been specially selected” offer and to see massive financial valuations in front of you on the screen was too much for most struggling farmers to resist.

The proof of all this is that the number of confirmed cases of foot and mouth (the only foolproof test was a post mortem on brain tissue) was extremely small.

I shall try to find the actual figure for you!

TonyN

That is certainly a take on the F&M outbreak that I haven’t seen before, but I can see how it might be so, and how the availability of information could drive what, in effect, became a new market for depreciated stock. What proportion of beasts were post-mortemed? One from each farm where there was a cull or was it more random than that? And how did the results compare between farms where there was a cull because an outbreak was suspected and the contiguous culls that took place as a result? If F&M is endemic, then would you expect a high proportion of beasts in the contiguous culls to show signs of infection?

Philip Ferguson

TN [Can you move the foot and mouth discussion sideways as I do not wish it to hijack an excellent discussion on computers]

I have set up this page so that anyone who wants to take the discussion further can do so.