The screen comes to life. The words ‘Foot and Mouth, directed by Lindsay Anderson’ flash across a sea of monochrome. It is 1955. A decade has passed since the end of the Second World War, and Britain is on the path to recovery. Yet, this path is marred by outbreaks of disease. This is a story of one such outbreak—of foot and mouth disease, which spreads among livestock. The screen shows a farm. One of the cows in the barn doesn’t seem too well. Two farmers inspect the cow, unaware that it is carrying Foot and Mouth disease. They do not think much of the cow’s symptoms and load the animal onto a truck which is headed for the local market. To us in the audience, this act of loading the animal on the truck is the last moment of peace. The script is painfully clear, written on the wall. As the truck totters down the open road, we know what is really being carried. Pathogens. Infection. Contagion. Chaos. And soon enough, chaos ensues. The only way to stop the disease now is to trace the routes and networks through which that cow travelled and cull all animals it affected. The culling begins. The sight of sickened animals is juxtaposed by gunshots. The face of the farmers who sold the infected animal flashes on the screen. If only they had acted differently, the voiceover now says, then we could have avoided this.
By ‘this’, the camera shows scenes of loss and destruction—the carcasses of livestock, the killing of animals to avoid spread, the huge economic losses. There have already been two outbreaks of this disease in the last five years, and the disease has devastated European neighbours too. A map shows the disease entering the UK from the outside—Europe—a sight reminiscent of war invasions. The message is clear. There is an insidious enemy in our midst, who must be driven out or arrested—it is the pathogen, invisible to the naked eye, but whose effects can be seen through and on the carrier (either infected or asymptomatic). But there is another enemy—ignorance— and the voiceover, clean, crisp and precise, stresses this: diseases are dangerous, but they spread not only through the will of the nonhuman microbe, but also through the faulty and ignorant practices of the public.
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