British Farmers Hopeful Cattle Disease Is Under Control

LONDON, Aug. 9 - British farmers reacted with some relief Thursday to the government's relaxation of the ban on the movement of livestock, a first sign that the spread of foot-and-mouth disease found in southern England was coming under control.

Skip to next paragraph Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency

Tourists passed a worker at Smithfield market in London on Thursday. Some 120,000 tons of produce pass through the 800-year-old meat market each year, according to its Web site.

Animals now may be taken for slaughter for the British market. But livestock within a protection zone around the farms affected by the disease still are not allowed to be moved, said Jane Downs, the veterinary and technical director for the Meat Hygiene Service. A European Union export ban on British meat and livestock is to remain in place until Aug. 25, veterinary experts in Brussels said.

Farmers, worried about a repeat of the disastrous impact of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, were somewhat heartened. "This is a measured and very necessary first step on the road towards getting the industry back to normal and maintaining supplies of home-produced meat to consumers," said Peter Kendall, the president of the National Farmers' Union.

In step with the British government officials, Mr. Kendall urged the members of his group to remain vigilant and to report suspicious ailments in livestock immediately.

The British Health Protection Agency announced a human case of Legionnaires' disease on Thursday at the veterinary complex shared by the government and a commercial vaccine maker in Surrey. Officials say the complex is the likely source of the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease at a nearby farm last Friday. The agency said it was believed that the case of Legionnaires' disease had predated the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

It was not clear from the statement by the Health Protection Agency what link, if any, existed between the discovery of Legionnaires' and foot-and-mouth at the laboratory complex.

The agency said its investigators were looking at the places that the infected person visited in the two weeks before falling ill.

Although the government lifted the ban on the movement of livestock to slaughterhouses in most of the country, a third farm in southern England is suspected of having animals infected with foot-and-mouth disease, the Department of Environment said.

More than 300 head of livestock on the third farm were ordered killed by the chief veterinary officer in Britain, Debby Reynolds. "I cannot rule out that disease is developing on the premises," which is also quite close to the laboratory complex, Ms. Reynolds said.

Inspectors were continuing their search of the complex to see how the foot-and-mouth virus, which is used at the site for research and for vaccine production, could have escaped to the surrounding countryside.

On Tuesday, a report by the Health and Safety Executive said there was a strong probability that the outbreak had begun at the site. The report did not single out which of the two facilities at the complex - the government-run Institute of Animal Health or the commercial Merial Animal Health, a joint subsidiary of the American drug maker Merck and Sanofi-Aventis - was the source of the virus infecting the cattle.

Both the government-run institute and Merial Animal Health have issued statements saying they had no evidence of breaches in their bio-security rules.

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