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More UK human virus suspects


The number of new outbreaks in the UK is falling

LONDON, England -- Four more people are being tested for suspected foot-and-mouth disease in the UK.

A spokesman for the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS) said on Thursday that samples from the four people had been received by the Central Public Health Laboratory after they went to their GPs with concerns.

Foot-and-mouth is a mild disease in people and there are no recorded cases of human-to-human or human-to-animal transmission.

The names of the latest suspected victims or their locations were not being disclosed, a spokesman for the PHLS said.

The new cases bring to seven the total number of suspected human cases.

Three other people are already being tested for the disease, which is very rare in humans.

Two have not been named, but the third is father-of-two Paul Stamper, from Dearham, north Cumbria.

He developed blisters in his mouth and the flu-like symptoms of foot-and-mouth after he was covered in fluids from a dead cow as he helped clear slaughtered cattle from a farm.

The results of the tests on all the suspected victims are not expected until next week.

Six people who were tested for the disease earlier in the epidemic were given the all-clear.

Since the first suspected human cases emerged, hundreds of people who are worried that they have the disease have phoned health officials.

Only those where concerns are felt to be justified are being asked to send samples to the Central Public Health Laboratory in Colindale, north London.

Experts say direct contact is needed with an infected animal for a human to catch the disease.

There is only one previous case of someone in the UK contracting foot-and-mouth.

Agricultural salesman Robert Brewis caught the disease in 1966, shortly before the last major epidemic.

The latest suspected cases came as the UK government announced a relaxation of the mass livestock slaughter policy used to fight foot-and-mouth disease.

Agriculture Minister Nick Brown told parliament that not all cattle on farms next to an outbreak of the disease will necessarily be culled.

The change in policy came after Prime Minister Tony Blair reprieved a photogenic newborn white calf that survived for five days under a mound of carcasses.


Phoenix the calf was reprieved after surviving the cull

The week-old calf, named Phoenix by the farmers who rescued it, was due to be put down after surviving the cull on a farm in Devon in the southwest of England.

But it will now be allowed to live after its fate triggered a flurry of appeals from the public after receiving front-page newspaper coverage.

However, Downing Street and the Ministry of Agriculture strongly denied the decision to "refine" the slaughter policy was as a result of the publicity about Phoenix.

A spokesman said the decision to spare the animal had been taken by Maff officials on the ground, not ministers in Whitehall.

"It has required a huge effort to get to the stage we are at the moment and we do not make policy on the basis of the life chances of one cow, one calf or one sheep," the spokesman said.

Brown also dismissed any suggestion that the policy had been changed as a result of the massive publicity the calf had attracted.

"I would love to tell you that the policy had been changed so that we could save Phoenix but that isn't what happened. Public policy cannot be extrapolated from the plight of individual animals," he told BBC Radio 4's PM programme.

The policy reversal follows a major slowdown in the number of new outbreaks. For the last seven-day period, the total number of new cases fell below 100 for the first time in 8 weeks.