Sir

Your Opinion article “Lessons from an epidemic” (Nature 411, 977; 2001), which identified an apparent rift between epidemiologists and some veterinary scientists, does nothing to analyse that rift. This is unfortunate: many veterinarians have been highly praised by the UK farming community. Surely you cannot criticize veterinarians for asking whether so many animals needed to be killed, or whether vaccination should have been used, or about the sensitivity of the epidemiologists' models? These are complex questions directly involving the lives of our patients and the livelihood of our clients. It is surely our duty to question the veracity of policies that have such swingeing effects.

It is true that all disciplines must guard against myopia and welcome excellence from outside to advance their science. We have learnt the advantage of this in recent years: for example, following the United Kingdom's BSE epidemic, chairs in veterinary epidemiology have been created in the country's veterinary schools.

The resentment to which you refer in your editorial, and which existed among some veterinary scientists, was not against the epidemiologists' models but against the rigid policy being adopted by the government following advice from these scientists, which did not allow any flexibility for local veterinary assessment of risk. To slaughter animals when there is no risk is not only immoral and unscientific, it is bad veterinary medicine.

In some hotspot areas, the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) — now the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) — has lost the confidence and support of local farmers, largely because so many animals have been slaughtered unnecessarily. No national animal disease control programme will succeed without the full cooperation of the farming community.

There is plenty of evidence that veterinary scientists are and have always been willing to work with the wider scientific community, but, for successful communication, the dialogue must be in both directions. An example of where this did not occur may have been the basis for your editorial. On 23 March, a group of epidemiologists from Imperial College London did not endear themselves to any of the stakeholders in the foot-and-mouth crisis when they refused to release the details of their modelling work until it had been published on 12 April (Science 292, 1155–1160; 2001). Fortunately, other epidemiology groups from Edinburgh, Cambridge and the Veterinary Laboratories Agency did make full details of their work and their opinions immediately available.

We accept that there are lessons to be learnt from this outbreak and we are keen to learn them. We are fully paid-up members of the wider scientific community and will continue to cooperate outside our profession, particularly in the control and prevention of animal disease.