Disease lab suspends production

• Story Highlights
• Pirbright laboratory suspends production after fears disease may have leaked
  
• Inspectors will investigate the biosecurity in place at the Merial site
  
• PM Brown says government will do everything to halt spread of foot and mouth
  
• European Union bans livestock imports from Britain

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A vaccine laboratory at the center of an investigation into a new outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England has suspended production at the facility southwest of London, the company's managing director said Monday.

"On Saturday night, we took the voluntary decision to suspend all production here at our Pirbright center," said David Biland, managing director for pharmaceutical company Merial Animal Health. "A decision that was made in consultation with DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)."

Biland said internal investigations showed no breach in procedures at the facility.

The move to suspend production was announced a day after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed that the government would do everything within its power to halt a new outbreak of the disease in his country.

Over the weekend DEFRA revealed that the strain of the highly infectious virus, responsible for an outbreak at a farm in Surrey, was the same as one produced at the Pirbright laboratories a few miles away.

Brown said the strain was one "not one currently known to be recently found in animals."

The site is home to Merial Animal Health and the government-run Institute for Animal Health (IAH), which both use the strain of the virus for research and to develop vaccines.

"Having identified a potential source, we've got to look at the transmission mechanism for the disease," Brown said on Sunday.

Culling of the 38 infected cattle in Surrey was completed Saturday, DEFRA said in a posting on its Web site. Cattle on two additional sites that together make up the enterprise and animals on an adjacent farm were also culled.

One of the additional cattle tested positive for the illness, it said.

Biland defended Merial in the statement he read outside the facility Monday morning.

"As I said last night, this site operates to the very highest international standards and we have complete confidence in the integrity of our operation here," Biland said.

"To date, our investigations continue to show no breach in our procedures; however, it is still too early in this investigation for anyone to determine the cause of the outbreak."

Inspectors will visit the Merial factory and the research laboratory "to be sure the biosecurity is in place and that we are satisfied with the arrangements," Brown said.

"Secondly, more intensive work will now be done in a concentrated area around the infected farming enterprise, and the purpose of that is to contain and control the disease and hopefully eradicate it from this country," Brown said.

Brown said he expected to receive an interim report on the investigators' findings within two days.

He added that it remains unclear just how the animals became infected.

A national ban on the movement of the affected animals -- pigs, sheep and cattle -- has been imposed.

A 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in the UK -- blamed for nearly 2,000 cases of the disease -- led to the slaughter of more than 3.5 million sheep, cows and pigs in a bid to contain the disease. The government was accused of reacting too slowly, allowing the disease to spread.

Foot-and-mouth disease affects cattle, swine, sheep, goats, deer and other animals, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Learn more about foot-and-mouth disease »

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said that the IAH carries out tests on foot-and-mouth at Pirbright, while Merial manufactures animal vaccines for the authorities in the UK and abroad.

"We do know that last month they were manufacturing a batch of vaccine that included this strain," he said.

Asked if he could rule out sabotage or terrorism as a cause for the outbreak, Benn responded: "We simply do not know, and that is why these urgent investigations are taking place at both parts of the site."

Biland said the company has been manufacturing vaccines for 15 years under strict adherence to quality control standards and never had such a problem, but welcomed the investigation and would comply with it.

The crisis has prompted a European Union ban on livestock from Britain and a Japanese ban on British pork in addition to its longstanding ban on British beef, enacted in the 1990s during the outbreak of mad-cow disease.

On Monday the European Commission said exports of fresh meat, live animals and milk products would be banned from all of mainland Britain.

All AboutGordon Brown

FMD is a disease of cattle, and very few human cases have ever been recorded, even though the disease is endemic in animals in many parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America. Foot and mouth disease only crosses the species barrier from cattle to human with very great difficulty. The last human case reported in Britain occurred in 1966. The disease in humans, in the very rare cases that have occurred, is mild, short-lived and requires no medical treatment.Still, this disease has large implications for farmers who depend on their livestock.