U.K. Bans Exports After Disease Outbreak

Britain banned exports of livestock, meat and milk Saturday after an outbreak of highly infectious foot-and-mouth disease and halted the movement of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs nationwide in a bid to control spread of the virus.

At least 60 cattle have been diagnosed with the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease, reports CBS News correspondent Larry Miller.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed to work "night and day" to avoid a repeat of a 2001 epidemic when 7 million cattle were culled and the farming industry was devastated.

"Our first priority has been to act quickly and decisively," said Brown, who returned to London from a summer holiday to deal with the outbreak. He chaired a meeting of the government's crisis committee, COBRA, on Saturday.

"I can assure people ... we are doing everything in our power to look at the scientific evidence and to get to the bottom of what has happened and then to eradicate this disease," he said.

The movement of all cloven-hooved animals, including cattle and pigs, was banned nationwide Saturday after discovery of the disease on a farm near Wanborough, about 30 miles southwest of London. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, or DEFRA, also said Britain had banned the export of all animals with cloven hooves. The ban covers live animals, carcasses, meat and milk.

DEFRA did not immediately say how many animals at the farm were infected, but said all its livestock would be slaughtered and incinerated. The cull took place Saturday.

Veterinary workers in protective white coveralls rounded up cattle and put them into pens. Vehicles entering and leaving the farm were sprayed with disinfectant.

Authorities imposed a two-mile radius protection zone and a surveillance zone of six miles around the farm. The road leading to a nearby butcher's shop was also sealed off.

The government's chief veterinarian, Debby Reynolds, said it was too soon to guess how the disease got to Britain — whether through the illegal movement of animals, on the wind or by accidental contamination — and how far it might spread.

The government-funded Institute for Animal Health's Pirbright Laboratory, which is researching the disease, is within the surveillance zone and about four miles from the site of the affected farm. Authorities have asked the lab to review its biosecurity procedures, Reynolds told a news conference.

"It is important not to rule out any possible source," she said. No one at the laboratory was immediately available for comment.

DEFRA discovered Saturday that the strain of foot-and-mouth disease found on the farm was identical to one used at the nearby laboratory.

The strain of the disease detected in the outbreak is not one recently found in animals, DEFRA said in a statement.

The government had said earlier the European Union would bar livestock imports from Britain in response to the outbreak, and Japan announced it was banning imports of British pork. British beef has been banned in Japan since the 1990s as a result of mad cow disease.

In the Netherlands, which was also affected in 2001, the government banned the transport of all livestock with cloven hooves in the country as a precaution. Authorities in Italy and Ireland urged herds in their countries be checked.

The case is the first in Britain since 2001, when the carcasses of many of the 7 million culled cattle were burned on huge pyres that dotted the country. The farming industry was devastated, huge swaths of the countryside were closed and rural tourism was badly hit.

Officials stressed on Saturday that there was no plan to burn the carcasses on pyres — a sight that had horrified many Britons.

Brown said officials were "doing everything in our power to avoid a repeat" of the scenes of six years ago.

Scientists were carrying out tests to determine the strain of the disease, and whether vaccination would be possible to halt its spread. Police patrolled rural areas to ensure farmers did not move their animals.

Reynolds encouraged farmers to look for signs of illness in their livestock, and said there had been a "small number" of reports from other farms. None had so far proved to be foot-and-mouth.

The government was criticized for not using vaccines in 2001. A report on the epidemic by a senior scientific body, the Royal Society, concluded that vaccination should be a major tool of first resort in the event of future outbreaks.

Farmers near the infected site were worried, but hopeful that quick action would contain the disease.

"We are keeping our fingers crossed but there is really nothing we can do about it except wait," said Michael More-Molyneux, whose farm is about five miles from the infected site.

The 2001 outbreak started with a pig herd in northern England and spread to cows and sheep. It eventually infected more than 2,000 farms.

British taxpayers paid more than $2 billion for compensation, disinfecting, veterinarians and the slaughter. The total cost to the country was estimated at $16 billion.

It was almost a year before Britain was declared free of the disease, and months more before British exports were allowed to resume.