Last updated 19:22, Thursday, 21 February 2008

THERE’S a wing and a prayer feel to warnings that bluetongue, should it reach Cumbria, would be infinitely more devastating than foot and mouth disease ever was.

It’s almost as though fingers are being crossed in frail hope as farmers and Defra officials together discuss the effects of this sickness which threatens to send every business it touches to the wall.

Sense of having to trust fearfully to luck is intensely real and cruelly harsh.

When the midge season starts again, rapid spread of the disease, which has already infected 79 farms in Britain, is a certainty.

Cumbria has so far escaped the worst. But how long can that luck hold?

The bald facts of bluetongue’s destruction potential hover as heavy clouds threatening ruin to farmers and rural communities, striking damaging blows to the county’s economy.

They cast a crueller shadow by far than the foot and mouth experience of 2001 because farmers can claim no compensation should their stock be lost.

And the Government’s order for 22.5 million vaccine doses goes nowhere near enough to providing the 80 per cent of national cover needed to control the disease.

Defra’s vaccination plan has the first two million doses ready by May for use in existing protection zones in the south – offering little comfort here.

Warnings to Cumbrian farmers to be cautious of where they buy stock merely nibble at the edges of looming disaster, doing nothing to reassure farmers – who remain helplessly at the mercy of infecting midges – nor offering hope to communities relying on them holding disease at bay.

Only adequate supplies of vaccine, distributed across the country, promptly and in sufficient quantities, could do that – if coupled with an intelligent compensation package as insurance against the demolition of a rural region’s aspirations to build and strengthen its own economy for proud self-sufficiency.