Nightline Daily E-mail: August 13

W A S H I N G T O N, August 13 -- Certain images in television stay with you. They prove the cliche that a picture speaks a thousand words. There are the famous ones: the lone Chinese demonstrator in Tiananmen Square standing in front of the tank, for instance. And there are some less famous ones that are equally impossible to forget.

Last winter, at the height of Britain's Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak, ABC News senior correspondent Jim Wooten reported on how farmers in the town of Hatherleigh were coping with the ordered slaughter of their livestock. One strapping farmer, who heard the news only hours earlier, broke down and wept in his field as our cameras were rolling. The slaughter of these animals was too much for him to bear. It was an image many of us could not forget.

So, months after the initial outbreak, after the British government's ordered elimination of millions of animals has been complete, we wondered how these farmers were coping. Worse still, in recent weeks new cases of Foot and Mouth Disease have been reported in areas thought to be free of disease. Britain and Europe may not be past this massive crisis. We sent ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff back to Hatherleigh, England to see how the farmers are doing. You will see the results tonight - but it is fair to say that the impact is still being experienced.

Back here in the U.S., farmers, veterinarians and the government remain on heightened alert for any signs of Foot and Mouth Disease among American livestock. The horror that Britain endured scared everyone on this side of the Atlantic. So Nightline's John Donvan went to the Iowa State Fair to see how that degree of concern is being played out. Among the beauty queens, corn dogs, and carnival rides, he found a very real public health concern.

The State Fair brings together pigs, cows and other livestock from all over the state. They rub up against each other as they are transported, housed and shown in competition. It was news to us that as a matter of course, animals at state farms are destroyed following the fair, rather than being returned to the farm's population. Apparently, this has been standard operating procedure to guard against disease, Foot and Mouth being only one of them, for years.