Hi All.

    There may be a parallel with myxamatosis here. It's a rabbit disease
which was imported to Britain from South America, where it was apparently a
mild disease, in, I think, the 1950's. When I was in my teens, around 1970,
any rabbit you found with the disease would be half dead. By the 1980's,
populations were building up, but myxy rabbits were still a common sight.
I've lived in central Birmingham since, where I've only seen one apparently
wild rabbit the whole time (hopping around the allotments in the snow a
couple of days ago) but last year I attended a conference north of London,
where the whole area was covered in incredible numbers of rabbits, there must
have been thousands of the things. This was at the height of foot and mouth,
and I was unable to look closely.

    This appears to be a case of resistance developing in a population; I'm
not sure how you'd differentiate this from the elimination of more lethal
strains, which is so often put forward as a parallel development. It sounds
logical, but does it happen in practice?

Regards,

Robert Brenchley

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Birmingham, UK.