Slaughter of the innocuous. A vet and researcher into the history of
foot-and-mouth at the University of
Manchester (UK) writes: “From the panic and the headlines you would imagine that this
is a most dreadful disease. Yet foot-and-mouth very rarely kills
the animals that catch it. They almost always recover, and in a
couple of weeks at that. It almost never gets passed on to
humans and when it does it is a mild infection only. The meat
from animals that have had it is fit to eat. In clinical terms,
foot-and-mouth is about as serious, to animals or to people, as a
bad cold.

Why, then, the concern? And why the policy of wholesale
slaughter? The concern, of course, is economic. This is a
financial issue, not an animal welfare issue, nor a human health
one.” The Times of London