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The Health and Social Consequences of the 2001 Foot and Mouth Epidemic in North Cumbria
 
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There are many references in the diaries and interviews to disruption of work patterns, including money, time, colleagues and relationships. For vets, changes continued as they caught up with routine testing visits which could not take place in 2001.

There has been a big backlog to clear after testing was stopped during FMD last year so we have to catch up with those farms who didn’t get the disease but are due a test, as well as testing the restocking farms.                                                                                           

                                           (Health and veterinary, diary, 2002)

They also report addressing new and increased animal health problems consequent to re-stocking. TB testing and re-testing with its associated anxieties was continuing as diary writing closed in May/June 2003. Field officers and other front-line workers from within DEFRA and seconded from other agencies (e.g. Environment Agency) speak both of very long hours and arduous conditions in 2001, but then experienced difficulties of settling back into routine work after the fevered pace of the epidemic. Levels of wages paid during FMD led to market distortions which created resentments. A slaughterman says of a former fellow worker:

He phoned up yesterday, and they’re still on standby from DEFRA. Never done a day’s work since September and he gets £220 a week. For ligging abed.

                                                                        (Frontline worker, diary, 2002)


After a re-stocking check a vet records:

The farmer is convinced he was given FMD deliberately and on arrival I was given his weekly tirade regarding DEFRA, Tony Blair, how I must have made thousands of pounds out of it etc.

                                                                                             (Health and veterinary, diary, 2002)

Yet some vets, like this one, were seconded from their practices on their normal salary, the balance of the funds going to sustain the practice as a whole. There was also a re-distribution of work: here a slaughterman made redundant from the abattoir due to FMD, joins an FMD slaughter team:

We went back the next day on the Thursday and we never done anything and he called us all intil like a meeting eh, and there was about maybe 60, 65 of us. And he just says’ I’ll have to pay you all off’, so that was it… and then he phoned on the Tuesday night and he asked if I’d go back and work for him. Going round farms, slaughtering.

                                                                                      (Frontline worker, interview, 2002)

An agricultural supply business tried to keep its staff on:

…. because we didn’t know how long it was going to last we, we kept all our, sort of staff on. But as the number of cases grew we lost eventually about ninety percent of our customers, and it was obvious that it was going to take a long time to recover, so we then decided we make 4 people redundant, so we dropped down from 12 staff to 8, I went onto half pay...

                                                                                (Agricultural related, interview, 2002)


They lost over 300 clients through confirmed infection (one third of Cumbrian cases.) His role as agricultural supplier changes to one of confidante:

Frequent discussions during each working day (or evenings) with customers who lost stock. They all seem to want to confide in other people [] this can be wearying as they all demand a level of attention and they are all different (diary, as above

                                                                               (Agricultural related, interview, 2002)


Income from tourism in the marginal areas was severely reduced and remained so throughout the whole of 2001. Small businesses report taking out bank loans to keep afloat during months of uncertainty.

Our foot and mouth loan has another three years to go, [ ] It just goes out of the bank so you know that every month it doesn’t matter how much you make, you’re not making as much as you did before, and you’re still paying back the money that you borrowed to get over the time when nobody came.

                                                                                     (Small business, diary, 2003)


However businesses in towns and villages in the central areas of Cumbria fared better. While hospitality providers on the fringes and in farm settings lost almost all their business, the hotels and guesthouses in towns in the worst hit areas gained business from incoming vets, field officers and slaughter teams. DEFRA alone spent over £4m on staff accommodation.

Some rural businesses in marginal locations suffered severe isolation and hardship:

..the silence, no it gets sad sometimes when you’re in here [ ] to be in here for a whole year every day to see nobody every [ ], you begin to hate the place, you begin to hate the very thing you love... for me to have walked out of that door (emotional at this point) not because of the Foot & Mouth epidemic but because the lack of awareness by our government to realise the human dilemma, the psychological effects that something like that can have on people’s lives, aside of the finance, the economics, everything, people matter.

                                                                                   (Small business, interview, 2002)

Conditions of work changed. Those on the ‘front-line’ speak of long hours, sporadic meal breaks, keeping going on adrenalin, exhaustion. Wagon drivers faced new imperatives when collecting milk or delivering feed and were under constant scrutiny as to bio-security.

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