Josephine Baxter

Animal Disease and Human Trauma: The Psychosocial Implications of the 2001 UK Foot and Mouth Disease Disaster

The 2001 UK foot and mouth disease (FMD) crisis is commonly understood to have been a nonhuman animal problem, an economic industrial crisis that was resolved after eradication. By using a different lens, a longitudinal ethnographic study of the health and social consequences of the epidemic, the research reported here indicates that 2001 was a human tragedy as well as an animal one. In a diary-based study, it can be seen that life after the FMD crisis was accompanied by distress, feelings of bereavement, fear of a new disaster, loss of trust in authority and systems of control, and the undermining of the value of local knowledge. Diverse groups experienced distress well beyond the farming community. Such distress remained largely invisible to the range of “official” inquiries into the disaster. That an FMD epidemic of the scale of 2001 could happen again in a developed country is a deeply worrying prospect, but it is to be hoped that contingency plans are evolving along with enhanced understanding of the human, animal, and financial cost.

Of Humans and Animals

In May 2003, a small group of people gathered on a bleak windy former airfield site to commemorate the slaughter and burial of more than one million farm animals. Some 18,000 animals were slaughtered daily at the Great Orton disposal site. Some of these animals were infected with the virus but most were healthy animals ‘taken out’ in the cull of contiguous premises, or as ‘dangerous contacts’. The ceremony was an attempt at regeneration and healing; Great Orton became Watchtree Nature Reserve. After the epidemic was over, landscaping work and new planting was carried out on the site and during the ceremony a huge granite boulder, a glacial erratic originally from Criffel just over the Solway, which was unearthed during civil engineering works to prepare the site for mass disposal, was dedicated as a memorial stone. Humans came along late in the life story of this boulder, but when we did, we did so in a terrible way. The plaque on the memorial says: Open image in new window

Community Experiences of the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Epidemic in North Cumbria: An Archiving Story

This paper recounts our experiences of archiving a large, sensitive, mixed method data set which produced both textual and audio material. In 2001 we began a 30 month, Department of Health funded research project into the health and social consequences of the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) epidemic in North Cumbria. The project generated a large dataset, over 3,000 weekly diaries and 70 recorded interviews. We offer our rationale for archiving this dataset. We describe how we set about seeking respondent consent for archiving. Finally we discuss our archiving process in relation to two overlapping issues that have well debated implications for the broader acceptance and take up of qualitative data sharing and re-use; that of anonymity and defining and capturing data context.

Working on the Frontline

What do we mean by ‘frontline workers’? In disaster situations, many people, some unexpectedly, end up working on the ‘frontline’ of the disaster. This is because the frontline often emerges in unexpected places. Disaster planning tries to predict these places and people, but disaster studies show that events cut across such plans and make heavy demands of people who get caught up in the chaos or its aftermath. In the FMD crisis frontline workers included field officers, slaughtermen, disposal site workers, vets, haulage staff. However, we could also argue that anyone caught up in the FMD epidemic was on the front line. These workers were often local people whose livelihood had been severely curtailed by the disease control strategies, who already had practical knowledge of handling livestock or the skills needed to operate the vehicles and machinery used in mass disposal; others were conscripted or seconded from a huge range of different occupations and parts of the world with very little prior training or preparation. They often had to operate in dangerous and highly stressful environments, to the extent that a number of respondents have likened this to ‘war-work’.

Exploring the Lifescape

The term ‘lifescape’ refers in this study to the complexity of the spatial, emotional and ethical dimensions of the relationship between landscape, livestock, farming and rural communities. As discussed in Chapter 3, the mass slaughter, often of healthy animals taken out under the contiguous cull, ‘dangerous contact’ rationales, or simply misdiagnosis, was all the more horrific because of its being out of place and out of time. In this chapter we consider the concept of lifescape and offer a framework to explore the lifescape changes enforced by FMD.

Global to Local: The Case of Foot and Mouth Disease in Cumbria

The extract and quotation above convey something of the nature, scale and devastation of the 2001 FMD disaster in Cumbria and how it was experienced by Cumbrian rural communities, households and individuals. How did individuals and groups endure daily disruption and what was for many profound loss, and for many more, the fear of loss? For most there was an altered everyday reality that has left a lasting memory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, we chart both a collective story of what happened in Cumbria and individual stories, personal recollections from local people who worked closely with us. The collective and individual reveal indexical accounts of FMD (references to concrete events in time and place) and rich, diverse, sometimes contradictory narratives or stories that nevertheless became coherent when brought together. This storytelling, a co-ethnography of the 2001 FMD disaster captures both personally meaningful accounts of trauma and recovery and localized cultural context of experience. First, however, we start by briefly considering the history of FMD in the UK and some of the ‘numbers’ related to the 2001 epidemic.

Trauma and Traumatic Experience

Our study of FMD and other disasters has led us to consider how trauma, and in particular, the relationship between traumatic experience and the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has come to be understood in such a context. Traumatic stress is perhaps better represented as the ‘normal’ reactions of those people exposed to an abnormal disaster event (Yehuda et al., 1998; Alexander & Wells, 1991). As Secor-Turner & O’Boyle (2006) indicate, most people who experience a traumatic event will experience feelings of fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and anger; these feelings are usually self-limiting and last three to six months. Our frequent interactions with those affected by the FMD disaster have led us to develop a situated definition of trauma. In 2001 traumatic experience was widespread and both acute and chronic, and people have reported feelings of shock, depression, including thoughts of suicide; loss of concentration and interest and recurrent thoughts and flashbacks. However while some of these feelings and affective disruptions remain, and perceptions of normality might be changed in the long term, we want to argue, along with Erikson, that this is what people who have survived disaster share, but it does not mean that they are sick. Survivors may be marked (stigmatized) by what has happened, but what helps is to find ways to understand and connect with this traumatic experience, rather than to separate it from wider society, to classify this as abnormal or ‘other’.