06 Jun 97 - New campaign on scrapie
06 Jun 97 - 'Mad sheep' fears prompt slaughter
05 Jun 97 - New guards on scrapie
01 Jun 97 - You are what you eat
01 Jun 97 - BSE is worst in imported beef
29 May 97 - Britain may ban German beef over BSE fears
29 May 97 - Farmers lose role as local advisers
23 May 97 - Bonn softens stance on mad cow disease
21 May 97 - Unhygienic abattoirs face closure
02 May 97 - Farmers call for limits on EU beef
17 Apr 97 - Does yeast hold secrets of CJD?
06 Jun 97 - New campaign on scrapie
By David Brown, Agriculture Editor
Telegraph ... Friday 06 June 1997
New "precautionary" controls are to be introduced to protect consumers from scrapie , the fatal brain disease in sheep that is believed to have led to mad cow disease.
The move, announced by Jack Cunningham, the Minister of Agriculture, comes after the Government's scientific advisers warned that BSE might have have passed back into sheep .
The spleens of all sheep and goats, including all butcher's-shop lamb, will be removed and destroyed. Processors will be banned from using mechanically recovered meat from the spinal column. Spinal cords of all sheep and goats more than a year old will be removed and destroyed at slaughter.
A compulsory slaughter scheme will be introduced to stamp out scrapie among the national breeding flock of 19.5 million sheep. Farmers will get compensation. Last year 452 cases of scrapie were reported in Britain but some scientists believe the number is very much higher.
06 Jun 97 - 'Mad sheep' fears prompt slaughter
By Michael Hornsby, Agriculture Correspondent, and Nigel Hawkes
Times ... June 06 1997
The Government is to extend "mad cow" controls to sheep because of fears that they may also have become infected with the fatal brain disease , and will order the compulsory slaughter of all sheep suspected of having scrapie.
Jack Cunningham, the Agriculture Minister, said he was acting on scientific advice that BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) might have jumped to sheep from cattle and be disguised as scrapie, a closely related brain disease.
"I must emphasise there is no scientific evidence there is any BSE in the sheep flock," he said. "What we are taking are sound, precautionary measures to avoid any possible risk to consumers, no matter how remote."
Dr Cunningham also announced that the Government will ban beef imports from other countries which have had cases of BSE in their cattle herds and do not apply the same controls against the disease as Britain. At present only Ireland, among European Union member states, has full safeguards.
The rest of the EU would be given until July 22 to come into line. "I would much prefer to have Europe-wide regulations enforced, but if agreement cannot be reached at the council of agriculture ministers on that date, I will have to act unilaterally," he said.
"This is no game. This is no bluff. I am in earnest in making this announcement. The draft orders are in my briefcase. It is nothing to do with protectionism. It is based on very important advice to safeguard public health."
He added: "I thought it was an absurd situation that, with all the rigorous controls on beef in this country, we are importing beef not subject to the same safeguards."
European Commission officials insisted last night that, if Britain acted on its own, it would be illegal. Gerry Kiely, spokesman for Franz Fischler, the Agriculture Commissioner, said: "As in all cases where a Government does something which is not in conformity with EU law, you start out with infringement procedures and possibly end up in the Court of Justice".
He said that Herr Fischler would soon put forward proposals for uniform application of abattoir controls, but a majority of member states rejected similar proposals last December.
Dr Cunningham said four weeks of consultation would be held with farmers on how best to conduct the sheep slaughter. Farmers would be offered compensation equal to the average market price for culled ewes to provide an incentive to notify animals suspected of having scrapie.
In addition, spinal cords would have to be removed at the abattoir from all sheep and goats more than a year old, and spleen would have to be removed from all sheep and goats of any age. Heads are already banned for human consumption or animal feed.
The Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) first suggested in July of last year that these organs could pose a public health risk because of the possibility that BSE might have passed to sheep in feed containing meat and bone meal derived from infected cattle remains .
Its head, Professor John Pattison, said the only reason his committee had not recommended that spinal cord be removed then was that abattoirs did not have the necessary equipment for doing this in sheep at the time. Such equipment was now available.
The new moves to control sheepmeat are likely to arouse suspicion among consumers. Scrapie has been in the British flock for at least 200 years, yet not until August last year were any restrictions placed on the consumption of the tissues most likely to be infected. The altered advice reflects a changed perception about how BSE may have arisen. When it first appeared, it was assumed to be a modified form of scrapie, caused in cattle fed on material that included sheepmeat. Scrapie itself appears to pose no threat. There is another possibility: BSE itself could exist in sheep, either as a spontaneous change in the scrapie infective agent, or by recycling material from infected cows.
Establishing that any particular strain of scrapie is identical to BSE is a lengthy procedure, since there is no quick test to distinguish between strains. The recommendations are therefore prudent but are unlikely to lead to the complete elimination of scrapie in sheep in Britain.
In Iceland, where this has been attempted, infected flocks have been slaughtered but new flocks introduced later to the same pasture land developed the disease.
05 Jun 97 - New guards on scrapie
By David Brown, Agriculture Editor
Telegraph ... Thursday 5 June 1997
New controls to protect consumers from scrapie , a fatal brain illness in sheep believed to be the progenitor of mad cow disease, will be announced by the Government today.
The moves are part of a drive to tighten meat safeguards throughout Europe. Scrapie is blamed for causing BSE when the rendered remains of diseased sheep were fed to cattle.
Jack Cunningham, the Minister of Agriculture, is expected to unveil the measures while warning the EU that the Government will ban beef imports from Germany and other countries if they do not fall into line with Britain's stricter BSE controls.
01 Jun 97 - You are what you eat
Roy Porter
The Sunday Times ... June 01 1997
Deadly Feasts
Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague by Richard Rhodes
Simon & Schuster £14.99 pp259
This scary book hinges on events in the late 1960s that closed the door on one scientific mystery and opened another. The puzzle solved was kuru, a deadly disease rampant among the Fore tribe of New Guinea. Victims developed jerks and spasms, paralysis and coma set in, and death would follow. It was like no known toxin or infection: small wonder that the tribe blamed sorcery.
Suspicions grew that kuru (the shivers) might be transmitted by the locals' penchant for feasting on dead relatives. But no progress in cracking the medical problem was made until the island was visited by Carleton Gajdusek, a brilliant young American medical researcher. Confronting more than 500 deaths in a small tribe, he suspected a genetic cause. Then a veterinary scientist pointed out the similarity of the symptoms to those of the sheep disease, scrapie.
Injections from sheep with the staggers were known to reproduce scrapie in other sheep. After obtaining brains of kuru victims, Gajdusek and his colleagues succeeded in inducing kuru-like symptoms in experimental animals Ç so there had to be an infective agent. They also found that brain plaques appeared like those in Alzheimer's and Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD), and the brains of kuru victims and experimental chimpanzees alike became spongiform. What was the cause? Evidently no regular bacterium or virus, the tiny organism, once discovered, was termed a "slow virus". By 1968, all agreed that kuru was spread by cannibalism; the practice was eliminated among the Fore, and kuru disappeared.
But the very same year brought a new mystery. Gajdusek also reported that he had induced CJD in a chimpanzee: so it, too, was transmissible. CJD had been recognised since early in the century; it was an uncommon disease of the nervous system, attended by tremors and other kuru-like symptoms, whose cause remained a riddle. But now it looked as though CJD , too, was an infection.
The acts of the by now familiar tragedy began to unfold. By 1985, British dairy cattle were dying in increasing numbers of yet another disease of the nervous system, soon labelled bovine spongiform encephalopathy ( BSE ). How did this "mad cow disease" spread? All likely pathways were eliminated, except one: food contamination. For cheapness, herds were being fed on the ground-up remains of diseased livestock Ç a case of cannibalism nearer home. A disastrous decade followed during which the government, putting the profits of the farming and meat-processing lobbies before the health of the public, turned a blind eye, promoted disinformation and downright lies, and allowed BSE to get out of hand. Scientists who predicted that BSE would spread to humans allege they were threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, while John Major assured the world: "Humans don't get 'mad cow disease'." In the end, the growing incidence of CJD led to Stephen Dorrell's notorious announcement on March 20, 1996, that there were connections between BSE and CJD.
Aseasoned science writer and Pulitzer prize winner, Richard Rhodes affords an American perspective: "The British government," he concludes, "has conducted a frightening natural experiment, allowing a lethal disease to spread through the human food supply, exposing the entire British population" . Given recent conclusive evidence of the transfer of incurable diseases from animals to humans, he finds it mind-boggling that licences are presently being issued so as to promote xenotransplantation, including the implantation of bits of pigs' brains into people. Rhodes tells a tale of brilliant scientific detection stymied by commercial greed and Conservative sleaze.
Is this all a matter of being wise after the event and simplifying a complex business into a heroes-and-villains melodrama? The answer is no, since Rhodes provides ample evidence to show how whistle-blowing scientists were being bullied and gagged by the late corrupt ministry . Not all the scientists in Rhodes's story are likeable, but the real moral of this tale is: don't trust politicians when your health is at stake .
01 Jun 97 - BSE is worst in imported beef
by Steve Connor, Science Correspondent
Sunday Times ... Sunday 1 June 1997
Senior scientific advisers to the government are to warn ministers that beef imported from Europe poses a greater risk to the public than home-bred cattle , which are subject to stricter rules to control "mad cow" disease.
New restrictions on imported beef, such as the banning of heads and spinal cord, will be recommended this week by the government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (Seac) following growing evidence of a hidden BSE epidemic in Europe.
Although an outright ban on imported beef is unlikely, scientists want the same tough restrictions to apply to foreign imports as those imposed on slaughterhouses in Britain. At present carcasses can be imported with spinal cords intact and officials have been powerless to stop a trade in imported bovine heads from the European Union.
The scientists have been told of new research showing that European countries are failing to report potential cases of BSE on a huge scale . The findings are expected to be published this month.
An international team of scientists who were given access to Britain's official records of cattle exports from 1985 to 1989 have concluded that almost every country in the EU has failed to report large numbers of infected animals imported into their herds.
In a country-by-country breakdown, the scientists show that the estimated number of BSE cases resulting from the importation of animals from Britain is several times higher than the figure reported by each government.
The study, which has been submitted to the Veterinary Record, the journal of the British Veterinary Association, is the strongest evidence to show a serious lapse in the ability of many countries to identify and report BSE accurately.
One member of Seac said the risk from imported beef was now greater than from British beef: "We not only have a broader set of controls, but they are more effectively enforced. There is also a great deal of uncertainty in Europe about the true scale of the epidemic." A European study of BSE controls in the EU found serious lapses in the ability of member countries to identify and report the disease. Emmanuel Vanopdenbosch, the Belgian chairman of the European Union's scientific advisory committee for BSE, said: "No country in Europe can claim to be BSE-free."
Estimates of the size of the problem in other countries are based on research by Dr Bram Schreuder of Holland's Institute for Animal Science and Health. He compiled the estimates from Britain's export records and the national BSE database held at the Central Veterinary Laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey.
The researchers assumed that the incidence of BSE in animals exported from Britain would match the incidence detected in beef and dairy herds in Britain. Dairy cattle had a greater risk because they were more likely to have been given contaminated feed.
The study found that BSE surveillance networks in every country had missed significant numbers of contaminated animals. The research showed that:
Ô Portugal has reported 96 cases of BSE, only six of which are attributed to imported cattle. The scientists, however, estimate that the real figure of BSE in cattle imported into Portugal could be more than 250 .
Ô Germany has reported only five cases of BSE in its entire herd, all of which are cattle imported from Britain. However, the study found that the Germans could have imported more than 200 animals infected with BSE.
Ô Ireland has reported 218 cases of BSE, 12 of which are imported animals. The study suggests, however, that the Irish should have had about 1,000 cases in imported animals alone.
Ô Spain has so far failed to notify the international authorities of any cases of BSE , yet the investigation suggests that more than 50 infected cattle were exported from Britain in the late 1980s.
Ô Italy has admitted two cases of BSE, both imported animals, but the study suggests this could be as high as 50 .
Ô France admitted it has had 28 cases of BSE, all in home-bred animals. The study found that it should have had more than 30 cases in imported animals alone.
Ô Belgium has failed to report any cases , but it should have had more than a dozen .
Ô Holland has admitted two cases this year, but it could have had more than 40 that have not been identified.
Ô Denmark has reported one case, but it could have had 30 or more in imported livestock.
29 May 97 - Britain may ban German beef over BSE fears
By David Brown, Agriculture Editor
Telegraph ... Thursday 29 May 1997
The Government may ban imports of beef from Germany and other EU countries which do not observe Britain's strict abattoir hygiene controls to protect consumers from mad cow disease, John Cunningham, Minister of Agriculture, signalled yesterday.
But he made clear that a decision, which would embroil the Government in its first clash with the European Union, must be taken at the highest level of Government, including the Prime Minister.
While insisting that the Government did not intend to take "unilateral" action against imports from other EU countries, Dr Cunningham conceded that it might have little choice if curbs are called for in the next few days by the Government's independent Spongiform Encephalopathies Advisory Committee (SEAC).
Some members of the committee, which advises the Government on BSE and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), are demanding curbs on any imported beef which does not comply with the British hygiene controls .
They say it is nonsense to import increasing amounts of meat from other countries which have suffered BSE in their cattle herds while it is produced to lower hygiene standards than British beef.
The British beef is banned from export anywhere in the world on the grounds that it might pose a risk to health. SEAC provoked the beef crisis in March last year when it announced a possible link between BSE and a new form of CJD in young people. So far, 15 people have died from the new form of the fatal brain illness. There is one other "probable" victim.
The Conservative Government followed every recommendation by the committee. Dr Cunningham said "If SEAC advises us to act, I will have to refer this advice to the Prime Minister. Then we will publish that advice."
It would be "difficult not to act" if SEAC called for curbs. "At least it would be action based on scientific opinion," he added. There was no uniformity in Europe, he said, on ways of dealing with specified offals, including the thymus, spleen, brain and other materials deemed most likely to harbour the deadly BSE agent. In some countries, cattle brains are still a delicacy .
He had persuaded the EU Commission to reconsider an earlier decision not to impose Britain's tough controls, introduced before and after the beef crisis broke last March, on all countries in the community.
He identified Germany, where resistance to British beef exports is strongest, as one country which did not observe the controls. Germany has suffered a handful of BSE cases . Prof John Pattison, chairman of SEAC, said yesterday: "The committee has already met to discuss the question of imported beef and is now considering its position. I hope that a recommendation to ministers can be made by the end of this week. It may be before the weekend or just after.
"I cannot pre-empt the committee's decision. We will report to ministers, who will decide what action to take. It will also be up to ministers to decide whether to publish our advice. The previous Government did and I see no reason why this Government will not do the same."
Farmers and meat industry leaders are angry that beef imports from Germany, Holland, France and Ireland, which have all suffered cases of BSE, have been soaring in recent months to take advantage of a recovery in sales on the British market.
These imports have hit cattle prices, now running at about 91p a kilo, about 6p a kilo lower than at the height of the beef crisis last year.
15 May 1997: Europe-wide ban on offal planned
Ô Helen Cranford in Brussels writes: The European Commission is expected today to impose sanctions on Norwegian salmon producers who are threatening the livelihoods of Scottish and Irish fish farmers.
Sir Leon Brittan, the EU's chief trade negotiator, is believed to have recommended a 13.7 per cent import duty after Commission experts found that Norwegian producers had received state subsidies, enabling them to undercut their competitors.
29 May 97 - Farmers lose role as local advisers
By David Brown, Agriculture Editor
Telegraph ... Thursday 29 May 1997
Farmers were dropped as local advisers to the Ministry of Agriculture yesterday - ending a relationship dating from the Second World War and paving the way for more consumer power in MAFF.
John Cunningham, the Minister of Agriculture, said that the ministry's nine regional panels in England were being scrapped to help to transform MAFF into "a more direct, open and accessible ministry for consumers and farmers alike".
In a move which signalled a weakening of farmer influence in the wake of the beef crisis and other food scares, Dr Cunningham said it was "time to move on", and that consumers should be given more priority.
The advisory panels, each of which costs up to £24,000 a year to run, were set up in 1972 to replace statutory county agricultural executive committees established during the war to maximise food production. Each panel had nine members, mostly farmers, who met several times a year to advise MAFF on local issues affecting crops, livestock and the environment. Members were unpaid but could draw expenses.
Dr Cunningham said he had written to all the members thanking them for their work. From now on, he said, junior ministers at MAFF would take over the panels' role in three designated areas of the country.
Jeff Rooker, the food safety minister, will cover the Northern, North Mercia and South Mercia region, Elliott Morley, the countryside and fisheries minister, will cover the East Midlands, the North-East and East Anglia. Lord Donouhue, the minister for the farming and food industry, will be responsible for the South-East, South-West and Wessex. Consumers' representatives are to be appointed to all advisory committees of MAFF.
Sir David Naish, the president of the National Farmers' Union of England and Wales, said: "The NFU has had a solid working relationship with the regional panels and farmers will be disappointed to see this useful channel of communication closed."
Ô MAFF is to be renamed this year in another move expected to place consumers first and in preparation for the independent Food Standards Agency promised by the Government.
23 May 97 - Bonn softens stance on mad cow disease
by Roger Boyes, in Bonn, and Michael Hornsby
The Times ... May 23 1997
Germany eased its hardline stance on "mad cow" disease yesterday, conceding for the first time that the transmission of the disease from cow to calf was "very unlikely".
The admission by the Federal Agriculture Ministry does not mean the ban on British beef is about to be lifted but suggests Bonn may be taking a more pragmatic approach to a problem that has bedevilled relations between Britain and the rest of Europe. Fears of maternal transmission of BSE have fuelled demands in the European Union for a more extensive cull of British cattle at risk that way.
British research suggests that maternal transmission does occasionally occur but not often enough to prolong the epidemic or to warrant a more extensive cull. If that is accepted in Bonn, the Government could find it easier to get agreement on relaxing the beef export ban, at least for meat from Northern Ireland, where there has been little BSE.
Some 14,000 offspring of cattle originating from Britain or Switzerland have been quarantined in Germany since the discovery of a BSE-infected Galloway cow in Westphalia at the end of last year. The cow was later found to be an import from Britain but confusion over its origin was enough to spark a new wave of "mad cow" panic in Germany.
21 May 97 - Unhygienic abattoirs face closure
By David Brown, Agriculture Correspondent
Telegraph ... Wednesday 21 May 1997
Abattoirs will be closed if they do not comply with hygiene standards designed to protect the consumer , the Government warned yesterday.
Jeff Rooker, the food safety minister, ordered the Meat Hygiene Service to get tough with slaughterhouses which were damaging public confidence in food. He told Johnston McNeill, chief executive of the MHS, which is responsible for enforcing abattoir regulations, that he should "be in no doubt where the Government's priorities lie ."
"The service should work with industry to eliminate the poor practices that are still too common," he said. "Every piece of meat that we eat must be produced to the highest of standards."
About 31 abattoirs in England alone - about three per cent of the total - which operate under special derogations from regulations are most at risk from the new policy. In March, 45 MHS employees were disciplined and three dismissed for failing to follow rules intended to stop the spread of BSE . Earlier, there were accusations that a report condemning hygiene standards in abattoirs and which could have prevented the E coli outbreak in Scotland which killed 20 people was suppressed by the then Agriculture Minister, Douglas Hogg.
Concern has been expressed that rules ordering removal of specified bovine offal from carcasses have not been followed rigorously. The MHS welcomed Mr Rooker's call. It pointed out that the proportion of abattoirs operating outside required standards had been reduced from 70 per cent in 1993 to only three per cent.
02 May 97 - Farmers call for limits on EU beef
By David Brown, Agriculture Editor
Telegraph ... Friday 2 May 1997
Beef industry leaders demanded urgent restrictions on imported meat yesterday as farmers reeled from a further collapse in cattle prices to their lowest level since 1981.
They would be seeking urgent talks with the new Minister of Agriculture from today to end EU "discrimination" which was threatening to drive many British farmers out of beef production. Don Curry, chairman of the Meat and Livestock Commission, the statutory sales promotional body, said: "We find ourselves in the absurd position that, while British beef of the highest standard cannot be exported, Britain is importing beef of lower standards. This cannot be right or acceptable."
The EU's worldwide ban on British beef exports was costing the industry £650 million a year and there was "no scientific or medical justification for it," he said. In an angry outburst at Beef '97, an international exhibition at the Royal Welsh showground at Builth Wells, Mr Curry said the beef industry was still in crisis.
Average market prices for beef cattle have plunged to 90.38p a kilo this week - more than 2p lower than last week and about 7p a kilo lower than at the height of the beef crisis last year.
"The combination of the strong pound, a European beef market flat on the floor and plenty of chiller wagons looking for return loads has led to a big increase in low priced beef imports."
Imports soared in January. "Our market intelligence tells us that imports rose again in February, March and continued in April."
Farmers' leaders will press today for more compensation from the European Union and the Government.
17 Apr 97 - Does yeast hold secrets of CJD?
By Andy Coghlan, Miami Beach
New Scientist ... 17 May 1997
Prospects for developing a treatment for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) may not be as dim as researchers feared. A team in Chicago has shown that a protein abnormality that affects yeast has stronger parallels with CJD than anyone realised. The good news is that the yeast "disease" can be reversed by tampering with the production of a second protein, raising hopes that similar strategies might work for the human disease.
CJD and other "prion" diseases, such as scrapie in sheep and mad cow disease, are thought to be caused by an abnormally folded version of a brain protein called PrP. The altered PrP is thought to convert normal PrP to its own, distorted form. Abnormal PrP then builds up in the brain, leading eventually to dementia and death.
Susan Lindquist and her colleagues at the University of Chicago have studied an apparently similar condition in yeast, in which a protein called Sup35 flips into a different shape. As in mammalian prion diseases, abnormal Sup35 seems to convert the normal protein to its own shape, forming aggregations inside the cell.
At the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Miami Beach last week, Lindquist revealed that these aggregations look almost identical to the PrP plaques found in the brains of mammals with prion diseases. "It's awfully striking," she says. "The fibrils are spectacular, gorgeous and highly ordered."
In earlier experiments, Lindquist and her colleagues showed that the distorted Sup35 can be flipped back to its normal form by altering the production of a yeast "chaperone" protein called heat-shock protein 104. Normally, HSP-104 re-folds proteins that are damaged by heat or by the ethanol produced in yeast cells as a waste product. But if the production of HSP-104 is increased or switched off entirely in a cell containing misshapen Sup35, the altered protein reverts to its normal shape.
Sup35 helps to "read" molecules of RNA, which contain the instructions for building the cells' proteins. PrP has a different, but unknown role in mammals. However, the discovery that both proteins form almost identical fibrils when converted to their abnormal shape has raised hopes that misshapen PrP can be converted back to its normal shape by tinkering with the production of a chaperone. "If you could tweak [production of the relevant] chaperone a fewfold, it could have a huge impact on the disease symptoms," says Lindquist.
However, Lindquist warns against expecting a CJD treatment to emerge from her research any time soon. "It's a hope, that's all," she says.
Paul Brown, a specialist in prions at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, says that what Lindquist has found tallies with the possibility that the yeast proteins are similar to the ones found in mammals. "But the crucial thing would be whether a solution containing the fibrils is capable of replicating and causing infection," he says.