The UK is undergoing a small crisis of parenting at present. The reason is that there has been an outbreak of E.coli, in one of its most virulent forms: 0157, which causes kidney damage in a small proportion of people contracting it, and the outbreaks have been linked to two city farms visited by children with their parents or as part of school groups.
City Zoos linked to disease outbreak
Forty-nine cases of E.coli have been linked to Godstone Farm in Surrey which has been closed, and its fellow site Horton Park Children’s Farm in Epsom, Surrey has closed voluntarily. Other sites have closed in Nottingham and Devon. In Exmouth, Devon, a petting farm has closed after three children became ill, although there hasn’t been a direct link from their illness to a visit to the site.
However, in responding to the concerns, there appears to be a division of opinion in the governmental ranks. Professor Hugh Pennington who was chair of the Pennington Group enquiry into the Scottish Escherichia coli outbreak of 1996 and Chairman of the Public Inquiry into the 2005 Outbreak of E.coli O157 in South Wales, says parents should not allow under-fives to touch animals on farms. But the Department of Health (DoH) is maintaining that its current advice still stands: contact with animals is okay if good hand hygiene is undertaken.
Youngsters most at risk of harm
The concern is partly that very young children haven’t learned good hand hygiene and so are not good at washing their hands, and also that they are more prone to complications from E.coli than adults. But there is a counter-argument being made by some health professionals that a child’s immune system is only built if it is given enough exposure to the wider world and depriving children of this kind of contact actually harms their ability to battle a range of viruses and infections.
One solution could be to provide better systems of hygiene, such as nail brushes that would allow people to ensure that they removed every lurking trace of the bacterium from their hands. It is impossible to remove E.coli risk entirely from animals or their environment, even though most strains of the disease are very short lived outside the gut which is their natural habitat. So parents must decide whether to give their children the chance to get to meet animals, to improve their knowledge and development and to boost their immune systems through contact with the wider environment, or to reduce the risk of exposure to E.coli by avoiding such experiences as city zoos and agricultural or wild animals, altogether.
City Farm photograph author’s own