A forgotten pandemic: What was the human cost of the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth
outbreak?
In the early months of 2001, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), long considered
by many, both in agricultural and scientific communities, as a disease of Britain’s past, began to rear its head after a thirty-year absence from the British Isles. 1 In less
than twelve months, the disease had claimed the lives of an estimated ten million
animals, such as cattle, sheep, and pigs. The disease, although never directly
claimed the life of a single person on the British Isles, wreaked havoc on the lives it
touched. Estimates have been made in the region of £3,000,000,000 for food and agricultural loss and losses in the tourism sector. 2 Although effective in gauging the
scale of the economic cost of FMD, these figures serve little to tell the story of the
human cost of the disease. Twenty years before the nation was plunged into
quarantines and lockdowns due to Coronavirus, communities in rural Britain had
experienced the hardships of isolation, separation of families, school closures and
forced business closures. Unfortunately, technology such as video calls and even
mobile coverage was unavailable to them. Personal testimony of those who lived
through FMD and media coverage from The Times , The Guardian , BBC , and The
Telegraph have been used to evaluate the human cost of the effects of FMD and
whether the lessons learned, which helped prevent the widespread outbreak of FMD in 2007 3 , were worth the price paid. The expiration of certain website domains
provided some limitations to the research of this essay, but this has not served as a
significant limitation. The county of Cumbria considered the worst affected area by FMD 4 , drew much of the focus for the research, but nationwide effects are also
presented.
1 Abigail, Woods, A Manufactured Plague: The History of Foot and Mouth Disease in Britain (London: Earthscan, 2004) p.138. 2 David, Peck, ‘Foot and mouth outbreak: Lessons for mental health services’ , Advances in Psychiatric Treatment , 11.4, (2005) 270-276, p.270. 3 Presented to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Anderson, Ian, ‘Foot and Mouth Disease 2007: A Review and Lesson Learned, (London: The Stationary Office, 2007) 4 Cumbria saw 44% of the overall U.K cases of FMD. Estimates placed 15,000- 20,000 jobs at risk equating to 9% of total employment. Peck, David, Stewart Grant, William McArthur & David Godden, ‘Psychological impact of foot -and- mouth disease on farmers’, Journal of Mental Health , 11.5, (2002) 523-531, p.523 and Vidal, John, ‘Foot and mouth leaves deep scars on rural Britain’, The Guardian, 30 August 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/aug/30/footandmouth.johnvidal [Accessed on 17 April 2023] (Para 4 of 11)
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