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Living in fear of the pyres
Have the government and the anti-vaccination farmers thought things through (Cancer fear from animal pyre chemicals, April 23)? Have they considered the hundreds of farmers, farmworkers and their families imprisoned on farms, unable to escape the carcinogenic fumes from burning carcasses on their land? Have they considered the consequences of even a minor flood on thousands of buried carcasses, and the inevitable leaching of putrid fluids into watercourses?Long-term environmental damage and the cost to human life is apparently less important than a few unaffected animals gaining a clean export licence and their owners lining their pockets. Vaccination would have meant a couple of years' relative hardship and a few burials or burnings of infected animals only.
A Franklin-Ryan
Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex
It's not just dioxins that should be considered when Maff investigate the burning of infected carcasses, but also the possibility of spreading the virus. As a science teacher, I am sure the residual ash is quite sterile, but what about the convected gases and dust caught in the updraught? Is a temperature reached that will destroy the virus?
TV pictures of cattle being dumped on hot pyres show the corpses steaming immediately, at relatively low temperatures. Cattle, like us, steam at body temperature, after all, and the virus can be borne on the wind. In a warm updraught, might it not be carried still further?
Jim Wilson
Halifax
mailto:jw@idsolutions.eu.com
It is alarming to learn that burning cattle pyres are emitting more carcinogenic dioxin than all the country's factories combined. In happier times, of course, the cattle would be consumed by meat-eaters, rather than by flames. Where does the dioxin go then?
James Tickell
London
From my home I can smell carcasses lying in fields. In Devon, more than 170,000 animals lie dead, waiting to be transported and buried. Over the last week smoke rising from pyres has plumed across the land. Evidence mounts of dangerous contamination resulting from pyres.
The magnitude of the crisis has escalated because of delay in getting to grips with the initial cases. The few incidents in European countries have been dealt with efficiently; why not here?
Dr Ann Allen
Alverdiscott, Devon
To reassure the public that the burning and burial of slaughtered animals is not harmful to humans, and show that politicians completely believe the advice of Maff "experts", Mr Blair and family should move to Chequers, where they would bury and burn large quantities of cattle and sheep carcasses before the assembled media.
Sara Davidson
John Ballyn
Didcot, Oxon
Who says that nothing good can come of the foot in mouth crisis (US tourists may not return for years, April 23). Sounds like good news to me.
Pete Reffell
Leeds
I believe there is a solution. The Queen must abdicate. The razzmatazz of a coronation (with perhaps a Charles-Camilla wedding the year after) should prove irresistible to Americans. This is a time for the Guardian's campaign to modernise the monarchy to go on the back burner (in the national interest, of course)
Jeremy MT Sutcliffe
Oldham, Lancs
mailto:Jmtsutcliffe@aol.com