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Foot-and-mouth disease led to 6 million slaughtered animals in England 21 years ago. Could it happen in Australia?

Robert Craig’s memories of foot-and-mouth disease tearing through the north of England are more than 20 years old, but they’re as painful as ever.

“It still makes my hair stand on end now,” the dairy farmer said.

“You don’t realize at the time that things do affect you longer term.”

There has not been an outbreak of the disease in Australia for over a century, but cases detected in Indonesia in May have put authorities on high alert, and farmers fear what could happen if the disease lands in Australia.

Foot-and-mouth spreads rapidly between cloven-hoofed animals including cattle, sheep, pigs and goats. It’s serious and highly contagious.

Warning: This story contains images some readers may find distressing

In February 2001, Robert Craig was raising a young family in Cumbria, which became one of the worst-affected areas during a devastating outbreak of the disease.

It led to the mass slaughter of cows, pigs and sheep.

“I remember being out in the fields, I think spreading fertilizer, and they were rounding up these sheep and lambs and there’s this truck in the gateway,” he told the ABC News Daily podcast.

“Seeing them rounding up newborn lambs and you knew where they were going, that was just hideous. Absolutely hideous.”

Men checking cow carcasses as they are lined up with excavators in the background.
Slaughtered cows in Yorkshire were lined up before they were loaded onto trucks and transported to a burial pit.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Mr Craig said he remembers tracking the spread of the disease on a map and watching as it got closer and closer to his own farm.

“There was a real sense of despair. It was hard for people to see at that time how anything could get back to normality because such a huge number of livestock had been taken,” he said.

Over the course of 11 months, more than 6 million cows, sheep and pigs were slaughtered in an effort to contain the spread of the disease, although only a relatively small portion of that number had the infection.

In total 2,000 cases were ultimately confirmed across the UK.

“I don’t know whether it did any good either. There was a fair bit of panic at the time,” Mr Craig said.

“It was just like, removing as much livestock as possible to try and slow [it] down, to get in front of it because it had gotten so badly out of control.

“I don’t know if they even tested these sheep that were taken away.”

Mr Craig was one of the lucky ones whose animals were spared, but his community suffered badly.

“Pretty much all of our neighbors sort of succumbed to it at some point,” he said.

“The whole of our area was pretty much just dead, like no livestock at all.”

Dead cows being sprayed with disinfectant on a farm.
In 2001, destroyed cattle with foot-and-mouth disease were sprayed with disinfectant to stop the spread.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Australians sent to help

Australian vet Bill Sykes has similar “life-changing” memories of the time.

The Victorian, who had a background in national disease control and animal slaughtering, was sent to Yorkshire, in northern England, as part of an Australian contingent deployed to help.

“It’s 20 years on, there’s a lot of things I don’t remember since five minutes ago, but these things come back, and they haunt,” he told the ABC News Daily podcast.

Mr Sykes recalls how the abattoir workers would try to calmly gain the trust of bobby calves, or calves less than a month old, before the slaughter.

“The strategy was to put his finger in the calf’s mouth so that it would happily suck and while it was sucking, he’d shoot the animal with a captive bolt pistol, and it would drop and then he’d go to the next one .”

But for him, the destruction of newborn lambs via lethal injection was particularly devastating.

“They went limp in your arms, you put them down and you picked up the next one,” he said.

“And I happened to love little lambs. I found that real, real tough.”

Mr Sykes said the immediate impact of the disease in the countryside was stark.

“At the bottom of the valley, everything is normal, sheep and cattle grazing in the paddocks,” he said.

“By the time we get to the top of the valley there’s nothing there, it’s just an eerie silence. It’s a sea of ​​nothing.”

Two men walk towards green hill, lined with empty paddocks.
The “sea of ​​nothing” remained after neighboring Yorkshire farms had been “slaughtered out”.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Australia assesses its preparedness for an outbreak

Bill Sykes, who is also a former regional vet officer in the Victorian Agriculture Department and former Nationals MP, is enraged by reports of Australia’s biosecurity laws being breached.

Foot-and-mouth disease can be carried on meat and animal goods, and in one recent case, a backpacker returned from Indonesia with prohibited meat.

The passenger was fined $2,664 after being detected with undeclared sausage meat and a ham croissant at Darwin airport.

“Just unbelievably dumb. Stupid, thoughtless, call it what you like, but that’s the sort of situation that can occur,” Mr Sykes said.

Foot-and-mouth disease can also spread in air particles between animals situated closely together, through contaminated water and on clothing and footwear.

The risk of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Australia has increased to approximately 12 per cent after the recent spread in Indonesia and its popular tourist island, Bali.

Mr Sykes said vigilance is paramount.

a number of officials in white coats inspecting sick cattle.
Officials from the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture visit a farm in East Java where cattle have foot-and-mouth disease.(Supplied: Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture)

The Australian government has introduced a range of measures to lower the risk of foot-and-mouth disease entering the country.

Biosecurity measures have been ramped up at airports, including installing acidic disinfectant foot mats and increased surveillance on meat products entering the country.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt announced a new task force will also be established to focus on how to best prepare for a potential outbreak.

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Australia

Foot-and-mouth disease threat prompts Victoria to form emergency animal disease task force

The Victorian government will establish an Emergency Animal Disease (EAD) task force to prepare for an incursion of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), which is currently circulating through parts of Indonesia.

The task force would be co-chaired by Agriculture Victoria chief executive officer Matt Lowe and the Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp, taking advice from Victoria’s Chief Veterinarian Graeme Cooke.

The Australian government has ramped up biosecurity measures to prevent foot-and-mouth and lumpy skin disease entering the country, since it was discovered in Bali, Indonesia a month ago.

Experts fear the exotic livestock diseases could cost the economy billions if it made it into Australia.

“We want to get a focus and targeted government response to a whole range of things we need to put in place in terms of being prepared and to prevent an outbreak,” Victorian Agriculture Minister Gayle Tierney said.

“[The task force] will be looking at things like developing an EAD response plan and will also be looking at access to sufficient personal protective equipment and the supply chain issues that we have in respect to testing, tracing, destruction, disposal and vaccination.”

‘No delay’ in task force formation

Ms Tierney said there had been a “lot of work already underway” that would help mitigate any EAD threats, including coordinating with the national process for service and infrastructure continuity.

a cow, with someone holding its tongue out.
The symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease on the tongue of an Indonesian cow.(Supplied: Dok. Kementan)

“It’s clear that there is anxiety within the farming community, people are wanting to know more and we’ve been able to give very practical advice through webinars,” she said.

“This is a good time [to] have those conversations at a grassroots level that give farmers the opportunity to turn that anxiety into very positive practical measures.

“We have a very clear understanding of what the risks are and what we need to do to ramp things up to ensure our preparedness is the best it could possibly be.”

Three hundred biosecurity staff were being trained through Agriculture Victoria to prepare for an FMD outbreak in the state, learning about scenario planning and emergency exercises.

Ms Tierney said despite Indonesia having FMD present in the country for months, the taskforce was a “rapid response”.

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