Smuggled meat served in a Chinese restaurant is being investigated as the most likely source of Britain's foot-and-mouth epidemic, the Times newspaper reported yesterday.
Infected meat, believed to have been imported illegally from Asia, went to the unnamed restaurant in the northeast of the country and the waste ended up in pigswill fed to pigs at Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland, Agriculture Minister Nick Brown was set to tell parliament yesterday, the paper reported.
An official report on the source of the outbreak, to be published yesterday, also found that the spread of the disease was so marked because it lay undetected in sheep for two to three weeks before the first case was spotted when pigs from a farm at Heddon-on-the-Wall were taken to an Essex abattoir for slaughter.
The paper said it was told that officials were alerted to possible illegal activity after a container of illegal meat, clearly labeled for a Chinese restaurant, was found hidden inside a load of household goods after confirmation of the first cases of foot-and-mouth.
Officials are convinced that they are on the trail of a meat smuggling operation that could have been going on for months and are urgently verifying how waste food from Chinese restaurants was used as pigswill.
The link with Asia fits in with strain of the virus identified in the infected livestock.
Professor Alex Donaldson, of the Institute of Animal Health at Pirbright, Surrey, said on Friday that the strain was common in China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Southeast Asia and had probably come from the Middle or Far East. Meat that comes from any region with foot-and-mouth disease is banned from being imported into Britain.
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