Anyone who doubts that the livestock industry should be subject to governmental regulation needs to observe what’s happening in England.

Officials and industry leaders there have been struggling for more than a week to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that now appears to be much more widespread than initially believed. Thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs have been slaughtered and burned, and a five-mile quarantine zone has been set up around each farm where infected animals have been found.

This isn’t the first blow to Britain’s ag producers. Mad cow disease has greatly reduced meat consumption in the UK, and many European countries have long refused imports of British beef. Now the British government has suspended export of meat, milk and live animals, and the United States, Russia, Hungary and the European Union have also imposed import restrictions. Other countries are expected to follow suit. In the Netherlands, more than 3,000 sheep, cattle, pigs and deer from farms that have imported animals from Britain have been slaughtered, even though no cases of foot-and-mouth disease have been detected in that country.

Closer to home, Canada has banned the import of Brazilian beef because of fears of mad cow disease. Producers in Brazil are furious, claiming that their cattle are disease free and that the ban is a reaction to economic pressures brought to bear on Canadian producers by lower-priced, higher-quality Brazilian meat. They may be right, because most of Brazil’s cattle are fed in pastures rather than in feedlots where they’d be more likely to contract bovine spongiform encephalitis.

The United States remains in a very good position in all of this, as long as American livestock remain free of both diseases. Because we have stringent regulations governing the import of cattle, and the progression of domestic cattle from birth all the way to the supermarket, consumers have no fears about serving beef. The industry has recovered somewhat from recommendations that dieters cut back on their consumption of red meat.

But all that could change very quickly if a disease such as foot-and-mouth disease — eradicated in the United States for many decades now — found a foothold here. This virus can be airborne, spread directly between animals, transmitted through contaminated feed, or carried by humans on boots and clothing. Vaccines exist, but resistant strains of the virus evolve quickly, especially in areas of busy livestock trade.

One of the problems in England seems to have been that authorities did not learn of new cases quickly. It’s somewhat understandable that a farmer facing economic ruin would hold back, wanting to be certain before he made a phone call that would probably result in the seizure and destruction of his entire herd. But such poor judgment allows disease to spread quickly and leaves officials and veterinarians scrambling to catch up.

We can hope that wouldn’t happen in the United States, but it points up the fragility of a system that relies on self-reporting by producers spread from coast to coast, in areas that may be a day’s travel from the state veterinarian. As long as the producers themselves understand the need for vigilance and quick action, the danger is small.