The cough that stopped a nation

An investigation by Robert Wainwright and Matthew Moore suggests sloppiness may be to blame for the horse flu outbreak.
A little after lunchtime on August 15, six of the senior staff at the quarantine centre at Eastern Creek in Sydney sat around a table to kick around a bunch of annoyingly small problems with site safety.

For an hour, they picked their way through an agenda littered with failings no one would expect at the front line of Australia's defence against exotic disease: open waste drains, broken pathways, dangerous tree branches, air-conditioning units shedding fibreglass particles and the horse surgery left a mess by visiting vets.

There were items on delays in staff training, poor labelling of chemicals and the need for updated risk assessments.

But in one of the quarantine stalls outside the meeting room, a much bigger problem was incubating. The prized shuttle stallion sire Encosta de Lago, from the Irish racing stud Coolmore, was running a temperature and had a slight cough. Two days later, when a stablehand noticed the problem, he had a precautionary swab taken.

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