Rural Affairs
Animal officers cull wrong bluetongue cow
A COW imported into the region with bluetongue virus was not culled for more than a month - after officials destroyed the wrong animal.
The Department for Food Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) has admitted that an administrative error led to a healthy cow being culled on a farm in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, in mid-December.
The mistake - branded as "unbelievable" by farmers - meant the infected animal remained on the farm until animal health officers returned on January 21, for routine re-testing of the herd.
It was only then they realised the infected cow, imported from within a protection zone in Lower Saxony, Germany, was still alive.
Since then, the rest of the herd has been tested twice and is negative for the bluetongue virus.
The disease that affects cattle and sheep - which found its way to Britain last year - is carried from animal to animal by midges.
David Hughill, until recently chairman of North Riding and Durham NFU, said it was very fortunate it had happened in winter.
"This could have been catastrophic if it had happened during the midge high season," he added. "It is unbelievable that these mistakes are still being made."
"When it first happened, the farmer did everything right. The priority was to get the infected animal out of circulation, but to think Defra took the wrong one in unimaginable.
"My heart goes out to the farmer and his family. They thought it was all out of the way and then to discover the wrong animal had been culled must have been extremely stressful.
"It's little wonder that people have no faith in Defra." A Defra spokeswoman said the mistake was because of an administrative error in recording identification numbers on the farm by animal health officers.
She said: "Results of testing on January 21 unfortunately revealed one positive animal which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be the original infected animal, which had not in fact been killed.
"The mistake occurred because of an administrative error with regard to the communication of animal identification numbers. This was identified in time to prevent further transmission of the disease.
"The remainder of the original imported herd are still negative for bluetongue, which indicates that disease is not circulating in the area."
6:02am Saturday 1st March 2008
Print 
Email this 
Comment
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
More on Digg
More on del.icio.us
More on Furl
More on reddit
More on NowPublic/
More on Yahoo!
