On his stock farm in the rolling country of Shropshire in western England, Farmer Richard Ellis noticed one day that two of his pigs were limping. He called in the local veterinarian, and received a dreaded diagnosis. His pigs had somehow become infected with one of the most contagious and toll-taking of all animal maladies: foot-and-mouth disease. That was in October, and the authorities immediately slaughtered all of Ellis' livestock, buried them and took other preventive measures to confine the disease to one area. But the malady, which spreads with the silence and virulence of the bubonic plague of...
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