Britain's foot-and-mouth outbreak is in its "second wave", and thousands of new-born lambs are under threat, the British government's chief veterinary officer, Mr Jim Scudamore, said yesterday.
The disease is much more difficult to detect in sheep than in other livestock, and government vets have not been able to predict how the disease will spread or how long it will take to control. Young lambs are particularly susceptible.
At least four large farms were already recording a high mortality rate among lambs, and the disease was spreading through cattle as secondary and even tertiary waves of infection were confirmed, Mr Scudamore said. Sheep farmers had warned of a disaster in the industry if they were not allowed to move pregnant ewes during the lambing season, which starts in the next two weeks.
In response, Mr Scudamore announced a limited relaxation of controls on the movement of livestock. Some farmers with pregnant ewes will be allowed to move flocks for up to half a kilometre on their holdings, enabling ewes to give birth under shelter instead of on open ground. He said permitting limited movement would not undermine control measures.
Large numbers of sheep were moved in the days before the first outbreak in Essex, but while Ministry of Agriculture vets had been trying to trace them, they had not been able to predict how many spread throughout the country, he said.
"There is no perception of how much movement or mixing of sheep has gone on. The crucial question is, are there many more `infected farms', and if so how many of these are incubating the disease which we have not yet found? And that's the question which we accept we cannot answer." Mr Scudamore said.
The government also said the large-scale burning of animals across the countryside, with pyres piled with cattle, pigs and other livestock, would end and animals earmarked for slaughter would be sent to rendering plants where they would be turned into bonemeal.
Specially constructed lorries will be used to transfer livestock for slaughter but, Mr Scud amore admitted, moving and destroying animals was "a large problem".
"We are dealing with huge farms with a lot of animals so we have huge problems with disposal," he said.
Yesterday 20 new cases were confirmed, bringing the total to 127, and most have been traced back to Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland, believed to be the source of the outbreak. The disease also appeared for the first time in Somerset.
In Berkshire, where a suspected case of foot-and-mouth was still being investigated at a farm in Baydon, near Lambourn, National Farmers' Union representatives were deflated after Ministry vets said eight separate holdings across a large part of Wiltshire had come into "dangerous contact" with the disease.
In some cases Ministry vets ordered livestock to be destroyed even when foot-and-mouth had not been confirmed, the NFU regional secretary for west Berkshire, Mr Gary Pope, said.
"There are huge anomalies. In a village close to Lambourn there is a farmer with sheep lambing, but he is not allowed to move them because he is in an infected area," Mr Pope said.
"He cannot even move them across a small road into one of his other fields on the other side. Yet he can put a horse in a box and drive it around the country. He said he would walk the ewes across disinfected straw but he was told that he couldn't do that."