Finding foot-and-mouth source 'could take weeks'
The abattoir at the centre of the foot-and-mouth alert says it could take weeks to find the source of the outbreak.
Cheale Meats, in Little Warley, Essex, confirmed it had been the site for the grim discovery among 27 pigs.
It is the first major outbreak of the disease in Britain for 20 years.
Abattoir director Paul Cheale says it is co-operating with the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) to establish the source of the outbreak.
He said: "Everyone in the industry has been left shattered by this.
"We are now trying to source where every animal which arrived here in recent weeks came from. That will involve many thousands of animals and many weeks of work."
Mr Cheale said it was still not certain that the source of the outbreak had been from one or both of two farms named by MAFF last night.
MAFF imposed a five-mile animal movement exclusion zone around the abattoir.
It also ordered no-go areas the same size around farms in Horwood, Buckinghamshire, and Freshwater Bay in the Isle of Wight. Both farms delivered consignments of live pigs to the abattoir last Friday.
But Mr Cheale added: "It is possible that these farms were the source of the outbreak but we will have to look much further back than that."
A MAFF spokeswoman confirmed that the airborne disease was already suspected to have spread to a farm next to the abattoir.
The Food Standards Agency yesterday advised that the cases had no implications for the human food chain.
