UK suspects third case of foot-and-mouth

LONDON, Aug 8 (Reuters) Britain said today's a third suspected outbreak of foot-and-mouth had been found in southern England but a ban on sending animals to slaughter was lifted in most of the country.

Investigators were still searching for the cause of the outbreak of the highly infectious animal disease with the investigation focusing on research laboratories close to the infected area.

''I have this morning ordered culling (of farm animals) on suspicion of foot-and-mouth disease on one farm adjacent to the second infected premises ... I cannot rule out that disease is developing on the premises,'' Britain's chief veterinary officer, Debby Reynolds, told a news conference.

After the first outbreak was confirmed on a farm in Surrey, southern England, last Friday the government banned the movement of animals to prevent the disease from spreading. Foot-and-mouth was found on a second, nearby farm a few days later.

Reynolds said the government would allow live animals to be moved direct to slaughter and dead animals to be collected from farms outside the affected area from midnight today.

Only farms, transport companies and abattoirs that met ''stringent'' biosecurity measures would be permitted to move or accept livestock for slaughter, she said.

The ban on livestock movement threatened farmers' livelihoods and led to fears that abattoirs would have to lay off workers and shops would start to run out of meat.

However, several supermarket chains told Reuters today that fears of shortages were unfounded. ''There is plenty of meat on the shelves,'' a spokeswoman for the Tesco chain said.

HARM TO INDUSTRY Britain's livestock industry, with annual meat exports worth more than one billion dollars, fears a repeat of a foot-and-mouth crisis in 2001 that devastated farming and cost the country about 8.5 billion pounds (17 billion dollars).

Animals from the infected sites have been culled, and three-km exclusion zones and 10-km protection zones set up around the farms and the two nearby laboratories.

''The risk outside the protection and surveillance zone is low but not negligible,'' Reynolds said.

Government inspectors say there is a ''strong probability'' that the disease, which has prompted an international ban on British meat, milk and livestock, came from labs near the farms where cattle were infected.

A preliminary report on the outbreak said there was a real possibility it involved ''human movement'' from the labs.

The government Institute for Animal Health (IAH) and another lab, Merial Animal Health, owned by U.S. firm Merck and French firm Sanofi-Aventis SA , occupy the same site in Pirbright, about 8 km from the affected farms.

Merial said it had complete confidence in its health and safety procedures and had found no evidence the virus had been transported from their centre by humans.

Both laboratories, which develop vaccines against foot-and-mouth, handle the precise, rare strain of the virus -- isolated by British scientists 40 years ago -- that struck the herd.

REUTERS AB VC2255