Disease Scientist Blasts Kill Policy

One of Britain's leading advisers on foot and mouth disease says his government slaughtered hundreds of thousands of animals it didn't need to in the campaign to contain the outbreak.
Dr Paul Kitching has left the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright, Britain's main centre for FMD, to head Canada's Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases in Winnipeg, MB. Leaked to the media, Dr Kitching's critical memo to the British FMD emergency team said that up to one in four sheep farms were wrongly diagnosed. On the advice of statisticians basing models on a 1967 FMD outbreak in cattle, which are affected differently, hundreds of thousands of sheep were slaughtered on suspicion alone.