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, and one that can’t be rushed. Scientists here have been trying to find the perfect vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease since 1954. Mason doesn’t expect to have one ready “for years.” Despite the acknowledged slow pace of scientific inquiry, the crisis in Europe is adding new stress to a workplace about as removed from the rest of society as one can get in these global times. There’s a palpable fear in the windswept air of Plum Island that, despite all the safety precautions and hard work, it may now be only a matter of time before Mason’s longtime viral nemesis invades American farms. “The feeling is sheer horror–seeing all the animals destroyed,” Mason says of the English epidemic. “Do I feel dread? That goes without saying. It must be terrible over there.”

It is terrible, and it’s getting worse. Foot-and-mouth disease has already spread to Ireland, France and the Netherlands, and possibly Germany. Meanwhile English authorities have stepped up their efforts to contain it, putting up a “firewall” killing zone around infected farms. They have already slaughtered or marked for slaughter more than 834,000 pigs, sheep and cattle. Britain’s chief scientific adviser warned that the epidemic could grow tenfold in the coming months and wipe out one half of the country’s livestock. Some farmers have resorted to suicide. British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned Parliament to brace for a long fight. “This is like tracking a common cold in the human population,” he said last week. U.S. Customs officials are on the alert, but there’s only so much they can do. Random spot checks at Miami International Airport yield about 2,000 pounds of illegal meat products a day. On a recent visit, Texas State Veterinarian Linda Logan saw a locker full of sausage, salami and half a pig from a confiscated suitcase. Although foot-and-mouth disease poses no danger to people, it is highly contagious–one blister on an infected pig’s hoof contains hundreds of millions of doses. “The accidental introduction is a big worry especially for people like me that are going to have to do all the extermination,” Logan said. “A place like Plum Island is critical for our ability to diagnose the disease.”

It may also be the best hope for a cure. Opened in 1954 by the U.S. Agriculture Department, the research facility is the only laboratory in the country, and one of only a handful worldwide, currently developing and testing a vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease. Security is extreme. U.S. lawmakers were so nervous about the disease’s wreaking economic havoc when the facility opened that they banned any samples of the virus from the continental United States. Sewage and waste from the island is heat treated to kill any virus. Air leaving the lab is filtered. New workers often report fatigue because the air inside the lab has been thinned to create a suction that keeps it from migrating out. Overall, the security precautions add $11 million a year to the budget–about 10 times the lab’s budget for vaccine development. For more than 40 years, few people outside the government were allowed on the island.

The secretive approach has led to bizarre rumors in communities across the water in Long Island. One local story has it that eight-foot chickens have free run of Plum Island. Or Nazi scientists were taken there to develop Lyme disease, which they shot from a cannon across the sound to the woods of Connecticut. “My personal favorite is the one that we actually shot down a UFO and are holding the aliens for study,” says Thomas Sawicki, the chief safety officer, who despite his sense of humor still refuses to allow visitors access to some areas of the lab. Some don’t find the rumors so humorous. Mason and other scientists had to explain themselves in countless town meetings. “It’s really beyond frustrating,” says Mason with a sigh, burying his head in his hands. “We’re working on what are really important problems. And we have newspapers and local representatives who look at us like we’re doing something bad. Like we’re a danger.”

Plum Island’s obscurity, and the rumors, are quickly fading. Scientists long ago discovered a way to produce vaccines for the different strains (there are seven) of foot-and-mouth disease. But for many reasons they’re not particularly useful. In addition to being slow acting, most vaccines only suppress the virus and do nothing to prevent it from spreading to another animal. And since existing vaccines consist of an actual FMD virus rendered harmless, it is virtually impossible to distinguish an inoculated animal from one that has contracted the disease. For this reason, most countries ban imports of vaccinated meat. In addition, the current vaccines are costly and need to be administered every six months. If not properly manufactured, they may even cause the disease. Britain, acknowledging that its policy of destroying animals has so far failed, is only now considering using a vaccine.

Ironically, Plum Island may already have hit upon a vaccine capable of halting the current epidemic in its tracks. Marvin Grubman, a virologist on Mason’s team, has developed a “recombinant DNA” vaccine that uses bits of DNA to trigger an immune response in animals. Since the new vaccine doesn’t contain a dead FMD virus, it wouldn’t show up on tests for foot-and-mouth disease. The key question the scientists are grappling with is whether it produces a strong enough immune response to combat the most virulent strains of the FMD virus. He has tested a version of the vaccine on pigs infected with a common South American strain of the virus, but not yet on cattle or sheep. A similar vaccine for the Pan Asia serotype O virus–the one infecting farm animals in Europe–has not yet been tested on live subjects. “We have one that might work against the virus in Europe,” Mason says. “But these are very complicated diseases. If I were in the process of trying to eradicate a disease the last thing I would want is people wandering around testing a product.”

Experience also suggests caution. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Plum Island researchers developed a recombinant DNA vaccine that at first appeared to work well on a number of animals. But extensive testing revealed that it was too weak to protect against some strains of the virus, and the project was dropped. “It’s a very difficult problem because the virus is so infectious and animals who have been vaccinated have to withstand a tremendous amount of virus,” Mason says. “We want vaccines that will stop the spread of the disease instead of just protecting the animal itself. We’re trying to develop a vaccine that could be used in an emergency.”

That is exactly the type of vaccine so desperately needed in Europe at this moment. Could the research facility be beefed up to head off the emergency? Mason emphatically dismisses the idea. “I cannot conceive of a way in which you could fast-track a product,” he says. “We don’t need a huge amount of money in one-time increments or allotments. It won’t answer questions. You can’t hire people in weeks, you can’t train people in months. It takes years to develop and expand programs.”

So for now, scientists reporting to work leave their ties, wedding bands and watches at the door. Behind tinted windows in fluorescent lit, “biocontained” lab rooms, gloved technicians continue their daily routine of monitoring animals and examining samples. They all know full well that in an airport somewhere an uninformed tourist just back from England may be carrying an infected salami in his suitcase that could render all of their precautions meaningless.