Not OK computer

Re: the letter from David Colehamilton (25 March). The 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak was reported to Ministry for Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAAF) on 19 February by the vet Craig Kirby after a routine inspection of the pigs at an abattoir in Little Warley in Essex.

The leading FMD experts were Prof Frederick Brown of the US Institute

of Animal Health and the Dutch vet Dr Simon Barteling. Both argued that vaccination was the key to rapid control of the disease rather than mass slaughter.

But Prof Roy Anderson’s team at Imperial College, who used computers to model human diseases, was chosen to oversee the FMD outbreak. It demanded that all animals within a 3km zone around known cases be slaughtered.

The computer programming human epidemiologist Anderson was soon joined by the surface chemist Sir David King – an odd choice of expertise on which to base a national strategy when Brown and Barteling were available.

By March the Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, claimed the problem was under control; King said the same in April; but before it was over in November, eight million animals, ⅛ of all those in Britain – and most of them healthy – had been slain.

King made the headlines again in 2004 when he claimed global warming was more deadly than terrorism.

The problem with computer models, as I’m sure Prof Colehamilton will recall, is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).

(REV DR) JOHN CAMERON

Howard Place, St Andrews

As a man who used to wear a white coat I disagree with John Cameron’s view (Letters, 23 March) that China’s “flailing despotic measures” didn’t reduce the incidence of coronavirus.

They did. In spite of having 3,267 deaths, indicating the scale of the problem, person-to-person transmission has been stopped. Massive testing has been one of the main arms of their response. I wish we were doing the same. HUGH PENNINGTON Emeritus Professor of

Bacteriology University of Aberdeen. Carlton Place, Aberdeen