Sir, Anjana Ahuja (Thunderer, Mar 1) misrepresents the Soil Association’s position on avian influenza.

We have been urging the Government to build up a bank of vaccine, not to use in the form of pre-emptive, mass vaccination — which we accept could mask the presence of bird flu among vaccinated birds — but rather as a ringfence around an actual outbreak. This is a control strategy that has been successfully used in other countries, such as Hong Kong, to contain the spread of the disease.

At present, the Government is proposing to rely on a culling policy alone. We have been here before. In the early days of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, the Soil Association persuaded the Government to consider using vaccination as a control measure in the same way as we’re proposing for bird flu. But vested interests in the meat trade lobbied against this, arguing that the UK would lose its disease-free export status. The results were 11 million animals culled, many unnecessarily, and a bill to the taxpayer of some £8 billion. Needless to say the export trade went up in smoke too.

Certainly, the Soil Association wants “to protect its interests”, but those aren’t limited to the burgeoning organic and free-range poultry sector, but to everyone horrified by the ineffective, medieval slaughter policy adopted during foot-and-mouth. Vaccination is now official EU policy to control any future outbreaks of that disease — so why isn’t this modern, scientific approach being considered as part of our armoury in controlling bird flu?

ROBIN MAYNARD
Campaigns Director
The Soil Association
Bristol

Sir, I was taught farming by an uncle, a member of the Soil Association whose bible was The Living Soil by Lady Eve Balfour. Later, studying medicine and thus trained in scientific method, I came to realise that, although many of the Soil Association’s principles had merit, it spoil its arguments by its doctrinaire attitudes.

“Free-range poultry” is a misnomer. Hens do not range freely, they stay in a muddy patch close to the hen cabin and tread the mud, contaminated by the salmonella-containing faeces of wild birds, to the nest boxes and thus the eggs. No farmer I know would contemplate eating free-range eggs for this reason.

A question to the organic lobby: would it or would it not have been a good thing if in 1845 a pesticide had been available to combat potato blight in Ireland?

CHARLES MATHER
Wigan

Sir, Sir David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government, in announcing this week that the UK was not immediately planning to vaccinate poultry if bird flu reached Britain (report, Feb 28), admitted that bird flu would probably become endemic here. This implies that we will have a long-term problem of how to manage successive outbreaks of the flu over a five to ten-year period, if not longer.

Apparently, currently available vaccines in the UK may not be completely effective and are too costly to administer. However, there have been considerable improvements in the quality of bird flu vaccines produced by the new “plasmid-based” technology, originally developed in the UK. Such vaccines have been manufactured in China and used to vaccinate millions of chickens rather than cull them. Although labour costs are different in China, we need similar high-tech flu vaccines as one way of protecting the poultry industry.

The Government should pay for vaccine manufacturers to stockpile vaccines. Similar vaccines should be developed for farm workers who are in contact with poultry. Surely, if the French decide it is economical to protect their foie gras industry by vaccination, there might be circumstances where vaccination is appropriate in the UK.

PROFESSOR GEORGE G. BROWNLEE
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology
University of Oxford

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