- A government agency is investigating the first 'Category
1' water pollution incident connected to the foot-and-mouth crisis.
-
- Hundreds of fish have been killed in a fresh water course
in Anglesey after disinfectant used during a cull of cattle leaked into
a spring.
-
- The incident is the first evidence of the serious environmental
damage experts believe the mass cull of cattle and sheep may create if
it is not handled more carefully.
-
- An Environment Agency spokesman said that restrictions
on movement around the country were hampering its investigations into the
incident in which hundreds of trout and eel died. He said that there had
also been a number of more minor pollution breaches which had been caused
by blood and animal waste leaking into rivers.
-
- The Government was facing more criticism last night over
the plans to bury tens of thousands of sheep and cattle after it was revealed
that a similar policy in America had led to an environmental disaster.
-
- Up to a million chickens, pigs and cattle were buried
in pits in North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd wreaked havoc in 1999.
The policy has led to contamination of thousands of wells which the state
relies on for its water supply. Levels of illnesses in the local population
have also soared.
-
- 'If you do it wrong now you will be living with the consequences
for the next 15 years,' said Elliott Moorhead, the chief executive of NanoVapor
and one of America's leading experts in animal waste disposal.
-
- 'What you are basically building is a pit where diseases
can breed. It is a potential disaster.'
-
- News of the pollution outbreak will damage the Prime
Minister's attempts to re-invigorate Britain's tourism industry which has
been hit hard by the foot-and-mouth crisis.
-
- A Downing Street official admitted that pictures of dead
fish floating in rivers was not 'the kind of imagery that will sell well
abroad'.
-
- Tony Blair is getting increasingly frustrated at the
lack of action on opening up the countryside. County councils across the
country said yesterday that they would refuse to open up footpaths and
access to the countryside despite orders from Downing Street.
-
- 'There is no evidence that any case of infection has
been caused by walkers, by visitors, or by people not in contact with livestock,'
the Environment Minister, Beverley Grant, said yesterday.
-
- 'This means that local authorities and others ought to
be basing their assessment of how far they can open up the countryside
on that scientific evidence.'
-
- The first evidence that the burial programme was facing
serious environmental problems came last week when Maff admitted that it
would have to dig up the carcasses of almost 900 sheep and cattle because
they had been disposed of in the wrong site.
-
- The carcasses had been buried a few metres away from
a fresh water spring at Tow Law, Co Durham, despite orders from the Environment
Agency that the area should not be used.
-
- Meanwhile, Agriculture Minister Nick Brown played down
the role that a Chinese restaurant may have played in the foot-and-mouth
outbreak. His department had previously highlighted illegal imports of
meat from China as the most probably source of the disease, the reporting
of which resulted in a 40 per cent fall in the takings of Chinese restaurants,
many of which received racist phonecalls.
-
- However, in a meeting with delegates of the Chinese Civil
Rights Action Group he said there was currently no evidence linking the
outbreak with imported Chinese meat. In an official statement, he failed
to rule out a Chinese restaurant as a possible source, but said: 'It would
be totally unfair to make a scapegoat of the Chinese community or Chinese
restaurants. The investigations into the source of the outbreak are still
continuing, and ill-informed, groundless speculation does nothing to help
the situation.
-
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|