Yet the animals were sent to an abattoir in Essex, a journey of over 200 miles to be killed. It was here that the first traces of the disease were found. Foot and Mouth is endemic in the Middle and Far East. This sandwich would not have been eaten in its entirety and the waste would have gone on to be pigswill. Although recycled food for this purpose is disinfected before being fed to pigs in this case it may not have been disinfected properly and the disease was inflicted on one of the pigs on the Northumberland farm.
Reports vary as to the numbers of animals slaughtered.
Around 100,000 perhaps are a conservative estimate. But not all have been incinerated, there could be 30,000 carcasses lying on farms awaiting incineration. The consequences affect everybody. The European countries are hardly likely to accept any meat or by products from us. There was a photograph in a newspaper the other day of some milk being taken away from a British tourist in Germany to be destroyed.