Historians of science do not often find themselves the focus of a media feeding frenzy, nor become part of the very events they are studying. Both happened to historian and former vet Abigail Woods when she wrote an article for the Guardian on the history of foot and mouth disease (FMD) in the UK - at the height of the 2001 epidemic.

Dr Woods was in the second year of a Wellcome-funded PhD on the 20th-century history of FMD in the UK, working at the University of Manchester's Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine.

When she began work, Britain had been free of the disease for more than 30 years, and the strict controls that the UK had helped put in place seemed to be working.

Then the 2001 outbreak plunged the country into crisis. Just the kind of event that most interested Dr Woods: "Times of crisis are when you get the real insights into how society views and deals with a disease."

"[FMD] has always been highly controversial, because the solutions inflict such hardship. Only when it can be stamped out quickly do people think slaughter is the correct solution. But when it can't be, and a crisis arises, then the different interest groups fight it out."

Dr Woods's thesis explores the interplay between science, policy and veterinary medicine. She asks why - despite tremendous changes in disease-control practices and veterinary medicine - UK policy remained essentially unchanged since the late 19th century. And she shows how the UK control measures came to form the basis for the current international FMD control framework.

FMD first arrived in the UK in 1839. For many years it was seen as a mild, although uncontrollable, disease. However, the Government did introduce controls to halt its spread during the later 19th century, and slaughter was occasionally used. By the early 1920s, slaughter had become official state policy.

What Dr Woods's work shows is that this was the result not of scientific but of economic arguments, first championed by a small elite of breeders whose pedigree herds suffered more from the disease then others. "The aim was not to live with the disease, but to eliminate it." Between 1922 and 1924, 250 000 livestock were killed in two major epidemics, causing then - as now - enormous hardship and controversy.

In 1924, the Government established an FMD research centre at Pirbright. Dr Woods's extensive research into its archives revealed how official attitudes influenced its work.

"The faith in slaughter as a method of eliminating FMD from the UK meant that at first vaccination research was not prioritised. Only in wartime did attitudes change. Germany's discovery of a vaccine in 1938 prompted fears that it might use FMD as a biological weapon against the UK." The wartime authorities feared that slaughter would have been unable to cope with the large quantities of virus that could be introduced by sabotage. Fired by these fears, vaccine research began in earnest.

But, while vaccination became increasingly popular in Europe, when the threat of a biological attack receded the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food stuck to slaughter, believing it was still the cheapest and quickest method of eliminating FMD from the UK. Even so, the policy had its critics. In the disastrous outbreaks of 1952 and 1967-8, protests against this policy continued.

From the 1950s, the UK also promoted its policy abroad. As a net importer of meat and livestock, it was in a strong position to make demands on other nations. It refused to accept vaccinated animals, and UK officials took the lead in setting up a European Commission that encouraged systematic Europe-wide FMD control. "Through it, they promoted the superiority of a slaughter policy and in 1989 were instrumental in the decision to halt routine European FMD vaccination in favour of a UK-style control policy. Thus, 2001 found the UK at the sharp end of the policies it had worked so hard to put into place."

Dr Woods believes that this history provides a valuable alternative perspective on the prevailing debate. "The main point of my article - and my PhD thesis - is that slaughter is not an automatically 'correct' response but a negotiated solution involving political, economic, social and many other factors as well as science."

So what of the future? Have lessons been learned? "What I've found interesting is that the official history is now being rewritten," says Dr Woods. "Before the 2001 outbreak, official sources promoted a history that championed slaughter policy - that it had 'always worked'. But the recent Anderson Report takes a more balanced approach. It recognises that disease control by slaughter has, on several past occasions, failed to eliminate FMD quickly from the UK and that this solution inflicts tremendous hardship."

As for her own contribution to the debate, she comments: "I wanted to use history to analyse and explain prevailing attitudes towards FMD. I believe it helped people to understand the official response to the disease."

External links

• Dr Abigail Woods at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester: Further information on foot and mouth disease
• Foot and mouth disease: The Guardian special report
• Anderson Report: Lessons learned Inquiry into the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak of 2001
• Little monsters: How microbes were depicted at the dawn of the disinfectant era (Features: 1 May 2001)