Re: Foot and mouth spread


"John of Aix" <j.murphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:46e96e4b$1$25945$ba4acef3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

OK then, sod the restriction zones, don't bother checking animals or
slughtering them, 'onlyme' reckons we can all live perfectly happily
with Foot and Mouth.


I suggest you wake up and get a fucking grip...retard!


http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2147335,00.html

Herd instincts ignore foot and mouth facts


"The press has no interest in calming us down, particularly when it's August
and there's little else on the news schedules"

Peter Wilby
Monday August 13, 2007
The Guardian


I've always been amazed by how the press gets so excited about foot and
mouth disease. Farming accounts for 1% of the economy and barely 2% of the
workforce. Genuine farmers - family-run businesses that could truly face
ruin - are far outnumbered by agri-conglomerates and TV producers tending to
a few sheep at weekends. An MP for one of the most rural constituencies in
southern England once told me he'd never actually met any farmers, and I
doubt most news editors have either.
The papers scream about a "deadly virus" on the loose, but it isn't even
that. Foot and mouth rarely kills animals and only one human in Britain has
ever contracted the disease. It is essentially an economic sickness, because
it affects animals' weight and milk yield and, as the Daily Telegraph put
it, a cow's value is "permanently reduced".

All the same, we aren't going to starve from lack of meat - the health pages
are always telling us to cut down on it - and an advanced economy like ours
ought to be able to take the disease in its stride.

But the press has no interest in calming us down, particularly when it's
August and there's little else on the news schedules. A foot and mouth
outbreak has the perfect news ingredients, and all last week it dominated
the front pages and, in the Telegraph's case, three or four inside pages as
well. There's a narrative, with the disease spreading from farm to farm,
more cows being culled and more footpaths closed.

There's human interest among what the Mail called "our hero farmers".There's
political anger, with farmers complaining that ministers can't possibly
understand because they've never been responsible, as a Mail contributor put
it, "for a yard-full of fattening bullocks" . There's mystery: where did the
disease come from and how is it being spread? And there are pictures of
sobbing farmers, men in white overalls and masks, and burning funeral pyres.

Most exciting of all, we have an airborne virus with, on this occasion, the
suspicion that it escaped from a US-owned research laboratory at Pirbright
in Surrey. "Who let the bug out?" demanded the Mirror. The Mail had already
promoted it to "a virus cloud" which had created a "30-mile shadow of fear".

The Mail went on to touch the other bases that are usually available in a
story of this sort. It discovered a "Cambridge-educated scientist" who had
allegedly taken chemical drums from the "vaccine factory" to his allotment.
Though he kept out of sight himself, his wife foolishly appeared at an
upstairs window of their home, and was pictured laughing. The Mail also
found inevitable deficiencies in safety procedures and earlier "security
lapses". These and other research centres, we were warned, held "potentially
lethal bacteria". We were facing bubonic plague, ebola and anthrax in
Wiltshire, bird flu in Berkshire, yellow fever in Colindale and rabies in
Weybridge. Most of them happen to be viruses, not bacteria, but headline
writers have always been vague about the difference.

The papers found only two things to be cheerful about. First, as the
ubiquitous Clive Aslet, former editor of Country Life, noted, there is a
mounting world food crisis. So farmers should soon be able to charge more
for their products, and then we can get all get a good night's sleep.
Second, Gordon Brown, continuing his remarkable love affair with the press,
abandoned his holiday. Better still, his wife and children came home too.
"PM who does well in a crisis," announced a Telegraph headline. "Will this
guy ever put a foot wrong?" asked the paper's columnist Janet Daley
irritably. "Thank God for Gordon," drooled a Mirror leader.

This was not, however, a sentiment shared by the Telegraph's Simon Heffer.
Overnight, the Essex-dwelling Thatcherite became a supporter of subsidy and
big government. Ministers should "step in", he wrote, and assist rural post
offices, rural churches, rural pubs and feckless farmers who hadn't insured
themselves. No, he didn't use the word feckless, but, after the floods last
month, he wrote: "If people chose not to be insured, then, I fear, they have
learned a hard but valuable lesson in personal responsibility. Many can
afford 20 cigarettes a day, or a bottle of vodka a week, but now they know
that life is not just about the good things."

I found only three writers who put the affair in proportion. Alice Miles in
the Times and Brian Reade in the Mirror said farmers should stop complaining
everyone is against them and assuming an immediate right to compensation for
everything. "Every single rural worry," wrote Johann Hari in the
Independent, "... is given a wildly disproportionate weight in the national
debate." He's right. But how else are the papers to fill space in August?




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