Foot-and-Mouth Wars

Peter Mason may have the strangest commute in America. Every morning, the balding scientist with the salt-and-pepper ponytail boards a ferry for a 45-minute ride across the Long Island Sound. Signs mounted on pilings warn the public to keep out. The boat pulls up on a gray, windswept island where sinister smokestacks dot the horizon and the air smells faintly of caged animals. Mason enters the lobby of a nondescript two-story building, walks through an airlock, sheds his clothes and strolls buck naked into the restricted area to his laboratory. (Garments worn into the lab are not allowed out.) Each time he leaves, he has to blow his nose, spit and take a shower. "In some studies, I've had to take six or seven showers a day," he says.

As foot-and-mouth disease rages through the countryside, thousands of British farmers are learning the hard way about the dangers of this highly contagious and fast-acting disease. But deep in the bowels of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center a few miles off the farthest tip of northern Long Island in New York, Mason has been doing battle with the foot-and-mouth virus for 10 years. It's a lonely job, ... // 86% Remaining