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New Pirbright FMD leak admitted

22/11/2007

A faulty valve has led to a fresh foot-and-mouth disease leak at the Pirbright laboratory complex in Surrey.

Environment secretary Hilary Benn announced in a written statement to parliament that pharmaceutical firm Merial's specified animal pathogens order (SAPO) licence for vaccine production had been suspended with immediate effect.

However, he made it clear that government inspectors had established that the live virus had not been released to the environment following the incident on Monday.

It was judged "possible" that the virus had unintentionally entered the site's contained drainage system.

The fault, which was detected when Merial was surprised by a shortage of virus production batches, led to the "probable" escape of the virus into a waste outlet.

Mr Benn admitted that strict biosecurity measures put in place after its licence had been restored on November 6th had failed to prevent the breach.

"Despite these measures Merial judged that the valve had been leaking, allowing an unintended probable release of live FMD virus into the contained drainage system, which was then pumped to the final chemical treatment facility without being heat treated," he said.

The incident has not led to a biosecurity breach from the Pirbright site as a whole, however.

"The extensive layers of biosecurity that we require under the SAPO licence effectively contained the virus in the closed, re-lined drainage system before deactivation in the chemical treatment facility," Mr Benn added.

An investigation into the cause of August's foot-and-mouth disease outbreak blamed five biosecurity breaches at the Pirbright site.