From the London Evening Standard 15.03.01
by Allan Hall in Berlin
Germany is considering its first deployment of armed troops inside its borders
since Adolf Hitler to seal off farms and guard its borders against foot-and-mouth
as fears grow that a case confirmed in France could be herald a global epidemic.
Voicing national fears that police and border patrols alone cannot cope with keeping out a virus that threatens to devastate national livestocks, the conservative CDU party is calling for troops specialising in chemical and biological warfare to be dispatched immediately, as are ministers in states near France including the Rhineland-Palatinate. The defence ministry in Berlin said today: "We cannot rule out such an operation."
Nearly 4,500 animals have been slaughtered in preventative measures in the country and French meat swept from shelves and burned.
Portugal has slaughtered a herd of stock after finding foot-and-mouth antibodies in two cows imported from the Netherlands. Agriculture minister Luis Capoulas Santos said: "We're not taking any risks."
Both Austria and Russia today banned all meat imports from France following its first confirmed case of foot-and-mouth disease. Imports from Britain are already suspended because of Britain's own declaration of a "controlled area".
The United States has said that anyone coming from Britain and the EU, and their luggage, cameras, computers and mobile telephones would be scrubbed with disinfectant. The US and Canada has also banned EU imports of meat, livestock and dairy products. The US has been free of the disease since 1929. Following bans by Australia on all meat, livestock and dairy products from the EU, similar bans are going up across Asia. In Japan, all passengers from London and Europe who have visited farms, are ordered to sterilise their shoes. Australia is considering similar measures. Japan also has suspended imports of pork and livestock from France, having earlier banned livestock from Britain.
Yesterday, Singapore - where French and British beef was banned last year because of BSE - banned meat and dairy imports from France and Argentina.
New Zealand and South Korea have banned imports of EU livestock and meat. The Philippines banned imports of livestock from Britain last month. China has banned even-toed mammals such as cattle and sheep and their products from Britain. Taiwan has banned imports of EU meat and dairy products.
Also this article:-
Britons living in the eye of the storm
by Keith Dovkants in Mayenne
In the hamlet of Niort La Fontaine gendarmes patrol disinfectant-soaked lanes
where Ian and Dusty McLellan love to ramble. This English couple's home is one
of hundreds owned by Britons in the north of the Pays de la Loire, an area long
favoured by those seeking the French rural idyll. Now, as foot-and-mouth takes
deadly hold in this expatriate community, the Brits find themselves in the eye
of the storm.
"It's very, very tense," Mr McLellan said. "Farming is everything here and I feel deep embarrassment that this thing has come to them from England."
In the worst case, he says only half-jokingly, he will point to his name and tell everyone he is Scottish. He and Dusty moved to Niort La Fontaine last autumn from a village near Maidstone, Kent. Mr McLellan, 60, retired from his business analyst job at Sainsbury's and they have thrown themselves into restoring their stone-built village house. They are learning French and have made friends, but like many others who have settled here the fear now is: will the French turn on us?
Fraser Blake, a long-term English resident, has already had a taste of this: "My neighbour's son took five days off to go fishing and when it was cancelled he shouted at me, 'You English! It's all your fault' or something similar. He'd had a few and I don't really take it seriously."
But relations with their hosts are a serious matter for the expatriates and Mr Blake knows it. He is, in part, responsible for the high concentration of English residents in the Mayenne department. He was a teacher in Britain and came here 10 years ago, aged 47, buying and restoring a magnificent stone house. Now he and his wife, Annie, run a successful property company that helps other Britons do the same. Last year they sold 40 houses to people from Britain. Mr Blake says at least 500 British families live in the area.
They come for the sense of living French rural life with the tranquillity and beauty of the countryside. The arrival of foot-and -mouth has thrown all that into chaos. In the nearby village of La Baroche Gondouin, scene of the first confirmed outbreak in France, a column of smoke still rises from the burning carcasses of cows. Results of tests on other herds are awaited today with unimaginable anxiety.