Human Suffering Of Foot And Mouth Disease
Whilst most of us see health and safety as an issue affecting our daily lives in our workplace, it is often difficult to realise just how far reaching the effects on people can be outside of the workplace, when something goes wrong.
Most of us within the telecomms industry will never come across issues affecting the farming community, save for those engineers amongst us who install and maintain telecomms equipment within farms around the UK.
The recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease brings home the realities of the devastation upon lives of those affected. Here is the stroy of one man’s reality, Gordon Nixon, a slaughterman from the north-east of England during the 2001 epidemic.
In his own words he told the BBC News website how all the horrors he saw have come flooding back with the news of the Surrey outbreak this week:
"I have seen first-hand the heartbreak and devastation caused by foot-and-mouth disease. I now receive treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder as well as taking anti-depressants.
I was just beginning to make progress, I have been seeing a counsellor for the past few months.
Seeing all these pictures again, I can hardly bear it. I feel like I'm back at square one.
I was the only slaughterman to be employed by Defra for the whole year and I was the only slaughterman to be based at a burial site.”
Gordon was responsible for the cull on 53 farms and put 48,000 animal carcasses into the Tow Law burial site. Physically attacked by a female farmer, he witnessed grown men break down, finding the scenes so hard to bear that he has even broken down himself.
He recalled one particularly distressing situation:
"On one occasion, I had just finished a cull. I went into the barn and then I heard something rustling. I looked up and saw a terrified calf in front of me.
The farmer begged me not to kill him, but I had to. I reported it to the vet and then I had to shoot him.
That calf haunts me every night.”
On another occasion he recalls that a farmer was about to lose control, standing in front of him actually stroking a bumblebee. Going over to him, he suggested the farmer go and have a cup of tea to calm down.
The farmer replied, "Cup of tea? I haven't eaten for three days".
Later that day, he put a shotgun to his head, with Gordon needing to call the police to have him restrained.
Gordon finished off his story to the BBC News Online website, saying:
"Seeing the pictures on television has brought it all flooding back. I haven't been able to watch today. I can't even try to explain the suffering this is going to cause.
There would be eight or nine trailors piled high with sheep and cattle.
It was my job to physically check them for signs of life.
Once I found a sheep that I knew was part of my cull from the night before. He had come back to life and been at the bottom of a pile of 300 carcasses.
People think slaughtermen are big tough guys, we're not. I'm 6ft 2in and 17 stone but I'm still human and I care.
The thing that hurts me most is that farmers were just beginning to rebuild their lives.
The people who say foot-and-mouth disease doesn't affect humans have no idea what they are talking about.
It's ruined my life. I don't live anymore, I exist.”
Source: BBC News Online
