Document Directory
11 Mar 97 - Radio tags may help to end beef ban
10 Mar 97 - CJD cure and BSE testing
10 Mar 97 - Labour steps up attack on food safety
10 Mar 97 - Hogg misled MPs in BSE carcase row
09 Mar 97 - Hogg in fresh furore over meat safety
08 Mar 97 - EU nations 'failing' over BSE controls
05 Mar 97 - BSE: Milk a conduit for infection?
05 Mar 97 - EU scientists say that British milk is safe
05 Mar 97 - Private cash backs Dolly sheep clones
04 Mar 97 - Pig manure dumped at Hogg home
01 Mar 97 - How now, mad cow
01 Mar 97 - BSE poses no risk
01 Mar 97 - Euro Commissioner gaff
01 Mar 97 - Heretical theory
01 Mar 97 - Holes in the brain
01 Mar 97 - EC health chief's gaffe on beef ban
11 Mar 97 - Radio tags may help to end beef ban
Robert Uhlig
Telegraph ... Tuesday 11 March 1997
How now, brown cow? Robert Uhlig says electronic tags will tell.
A prototype national cattle identification system could help British beef to be certified fit for worldwide export within three years.
The scheme, based on a location system already in use in Northern Ireland, can track the movements from birth to slaughter of the 10 million-strong British dairy and beef herd.
The European Union and the Government have said the ban on British beef products cannot be lifted until cattle-tracing is practised, and that a scheme must be implemented by 1998.
Despite the selective culling programme now in operation, the European Union will not lift the ban on British beef products until something is in place.
Under the prototype system, demonstrated in January at the National British Cattle Breeders Annual Conference, each animal is tagged with a radio transmitter. When a cow is sold at market, taken to a vet, transported between farms or slaughtered, electronic readers pick up the radio signal and keep track of the animal.
If a member of the herd is later discovered to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), officials can quickly trace the path of the animal from farmer to farmer, and determine any other cattle it has come into contact with.
According to Brian Daly, a spokesman for Unisys, the computer company developing the system, the cattle database has been developed in close consultation with the British dairy and beef industry.
"We have demonstrated the system works at the agricultural show. It can trace any one of several million cattle within seconds," he said.
"While Ulster farmers might expect soon to be resuming the export of their beef worldwide thanks to the traceability we can provide, the lack of such a system in Scotland, Wales and England means farmers face a beef export ban at least until 1999."
The system will require a massive investment in infrastructure - every farmer, slaughterhouse, vet and market must be connected to a network to provide details of their animals' movements.
However, the current method for keeping tabs is also unwieldy, with farmers having to keep detailed paper records of every cow that passes through their farms.
The new system would ideally use the Internet to monitor cattle movements, but fax, post and telephone could be used until all farmers have their own computer-based links. In the case of an outbreak of BSE, officials would access the system to trace all beasts that had come into contact with the diseased animal.
The scheme has been developed with accountants Coopers and Lybrand. The firm has conducted a number of studies on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food into the effects of the export ban on the UK beef industry.
Despite the successful operation of a similar Unisys set-up in Northern Ireland, several issues remain to be resolved, not least its compliance with a proposed Europe-wide cattle tracing system.
10 Mar 97 - CJD cure and BSE testing
UK Correspondent
BBC 20.00 radio news ... Monday 10 March 1997
Two BSE related developments were briefly commented upon in the BBC news broadcast this evening.
Firstly, a potential cure for the human form of CJD is under development.
Secondly, the UK government does not intent to introduce tests which could detect BSE in live animals. Although it was not stated in the broadcast, this almost certainly a MAFF influenced decision. Beef cattle are normally slaughtered at 3 years, as BSE normally becomes apparent at 4 years MAFF portrays beef herds as BSE free. The test might contradict this.
10 Mar 97 - Labour steps up attack on food safety
By David Brown
Telegraph ... Monday 10 March 1997
Labour will renew its attack on the Government's food safety record tomorrow when it announces its own scientific safeguards after BSE and the E coli outbreak.
A London conference, organised by Scientists for Labour, will support plans for an independent food standards agency and a halt to research cutbacks.
Speakers will include Prof Hugh Pennington, who is heading the Government's E coli inquiry. Gavin Strang, shadow agriculture minister, said last night that government cuts in basic scientific research had put consumers at risk.
He said the number of government scientists employed on agricultural and food research had fallen since 1979 from 3,417 to 2,003 .
10 Mar 97 - Hogg misled MPs in BSE carcase row
by Fiona Cairns
Evening Standard ... Monday, 10 March
Beleaguered Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg ran into fresh trouble today, as it was revealed that he misled MPs over the burial of BSE-infected cattle . Mr Hogg told Parliament last week that three cattle suspected of carrying BSE were buried in landfill sites last year. Overall, he said, more than 6,000 had been buried since BSE was first identified. The announcement provoked fury from Labour, who seized on it as a new food scare. There are fears that the burial of carcases could lead to BSE entering the food chain through the soil , and the Government was supposed to have stopped the practice in 1988 . Since then all carcases should have been incinerated. Today, however, the Ministry of Agriculture said the three carcases supposedly buried last year had actually been sent for research and were later incinerated. The admission of the mistake will put pressure on Mr Hogg to apologise to Parliament for misleading MPs - a serious Commons offence. Labour's Helen Jackson today demanded that Mr Hogg appear before the House of Commons to explain what had happened. "Simply slipping out a written change to the Government's previous inaccurate answer is not good enough," she said. "Public concern over the Government's handling of the BSE crisis is so great there must be a statement on this issue to the House." The latest slip-up follows last week's row over a report on E-coli in slaughter houses, which forced Mr Hogg onto the defensive. It also comes on the same day a "witch-hunt" in the Ministry of Defence began over how Parliament was misled about the use of pesticides in the Gulf War. A crack team of military police investigators started questioning civil servants and soldiers about why the fact that organophosphates were widely used during the conflict was withheld from ministers. The pesticides are suspected as a possible cause of Gulf War Syndrome . In December, Armed Forces Minister Nicholas Soames was forced to apologise to Parliament after wrongly telling MPs that they were not widely used, and blamed his staff for misinforming him. Whoever is found to be responsible is likely to face stern disciplinary action and possible dismissal. The Ministry of Defence is reviewing how it answers parliamentary questions. Today's correction from the Ministry of Agriculture comes after a written reply given by Mr Hogg to Labour's agriculture spokesman Gavin Strang last Thursday. In it Mr Hogg said it was impossible to say how many BSE suspect carcases had been buried at different landfill sites since the crisis first broke, "as a complete set of records is not held centrally. To provide a complete record could only be done at disproportionate cost". But he did tell Dr Strang that three carcases had been buried last year . As far back as June 1988, an official working party on BSE, chaired by Sir Richard Southwood, recommended that "carcases of infected animals should be destroyed".
09 Mar 97 - Hogg in fresh furore over meat safety
By Greg Neale, Environment Correspondent
Telegraph ... Sunday 9 March 1997
Douglas Hogg, the Agriculture Minister, is at the centre of a new food safety row following claims by Labour that Government officials tried to cover up the discovery of banned beef products in butchers' shops .
Labour says that council environmental health officers in Birmingham discovered thymus glands from cattle in butchers' shops in the city last year. These parts are banned along with spinal cords and other offal in a bid to control the spread of BSE.
John Prescott, the Labour deputy leader, called for Mr Hogg to be sacked over the alleged actions of the Government's Meat Hygiene Service. But junior Agriculture Minister Angela Browning is denying the pieces found were banned products, and a spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture said: "We could not identify the material, as it had decomposed, but it definitely was not a piece of thymus gland."
These claims come hot on the heels of another food safety controversy last week, when Mr Hogg's officials were accused of suppressing an early draft of a report showing poor standards of cleanliness in abattoirs. In the resulting parliamentary row the Scottish Secretary, Michael Forsyth, was reported to be "incandescent " with anger that the report had not been made available to scientists investigating the E coli bacteria outbreak which recently claimed 20 lives in Scotland.
Labour stepped up its attack on Mr Hogg, releasing correspondence which they said showed the Ministry of Agriculture had misled the European Commission over the incident.
Mr Prescott repeated the call made on Friday by Tony Blair, the Labour leader, for a new independent food agency to be set up. He also and attacked the performance of the Meat Hygiene Service.
"It is deeply disturbing that the one agency that is there to safeguard meat safety is reluctant to accept evidence of poor standards," Mr Prescott said.
A Birmingham council spokeswoman said yesterday it had conclusive evidence that its inspectors had discovered thymus material which had been traced back to British abattoirs .
08 Mar 97 - EU nations 'failing' over BSE controls
By Caroline Southey in Brussels
Financial Times ... Saturday March 8 1997
Evidence that many EU countries have failed to detect the full scale of mad cow disease or protect consumers from infected beef is revealed in a damning European Commission report.
The document reveals an alarming picture of poor controls and a lack of trained scientists which is preventing the detection of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in some European Union countries. It also says BSE-infected offal may still be entering the food chain .
The findings of the report - by the Commission's agriculture directorate and based on inspections in 13 EU countries - have caused consternation in some, notably Germany, where officials are described as "apoplectic " at the criticisms.
The UK and Portugal were not included as they have already had numerous Commission inspections. The EU imposed a worldwide ban on British beef a year ago after the UK government triggered a crisis in the beef market by admitting a possible link between BSE and the fatal Creutzfeld-Jakob human brain disease.
The report lends strength to British government claims that BSE is not confined to the UK and that its EU partners have neglected to take action.
Dutch scientists have calculated that at least 1,668 cases of BSE should have occurred in the EU, but only 291 cases, excluding the UK, have been reported to the Commission. The UK figure stands at 172,785.
The report's findings reveal a catalogue of errors in the way individual countries have tackled the threat of mad cow disease.
ïThere are no uniform rules for detecting BSE. Local authorities are issuing different regulations on how to identify and treat a suspect case clinically and dispose of carcasses. ïCattle with central nervous symptoms like rabies, but which have not been declared BSE-free, may have entered the food chain. ïThere is poor diagnosis of BSE and a lack of trained laboratory staff. A "high number of samples" arrive at laboratories in unsuitable condition for testing. ïEarly detection is not taking place because official veterinarians are not always familiar with the early clinical signs of BSE.
The report was originally commissioned in order to strengthen the hand of Mr Franz Fischler, EU agriculture commissioner, who has fought in vain to persuade farm ministers to ban material such as brains and spinal cords from the human and animal food chain .
Ten countries voted against Mr Fischler's proposals which included banning the high-risk material from goats, sheep and cattle. Only France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal and the UK voted in favour.
The report calls for a network of BSE surveillance in all member states. Its general indictment of practices in the EU is bound to increase pressure to publish the confidential studies of individual countries, which provided material for the report. A British government spokesman said: "The UK has not seen this report. We are sure that our controls mean that British beef is safe."
05 Mar 97 - BSE: Milk ruled out as conduit for infection
By Caroline Southey in Brussels
Financial Times ... Wednesday March 5 1997
EU scientists have ruled that cow's milk is safe to drink , concluding in a report released yesterday that there is no risk of mad cow disease being transmitted to consumers through milk or milk products .
The safety of milk has been questioned since the release of an interim study in the UK which suggested that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) could be transmitted from mother to calf. The report raised fears about possible BSE infection through milk and led to some German states blocking the imports of British milk and milk products.
Scientists have not yet ruled conclusively on how maternal transmission takes place . However, the study points out that research on 300 home-bred UK herds with one or more confirmed cases of BSE showed that there was "no significant evidence for maternal transmission". The study also rules out milk as a possible conduit for the disease.
"There is no evidence that milk transmits BSE and the committee considers any risk from milk to be negligible," concluded the report, drawn up by EU's standing veterinary committee, which is made up of representatives from member states.
The committee said it had "no hesitation" in recommending that milk and milk products from healthy cattle could be drunk "by any species". It said, however, that a "low level of infection in colostrum cannot be excluded" but that the risk from colostrum (liquid produced by the mother in the first few days following birth) was "negligible".
The committee recommended that the ban on milk from cows suspected of having BSE be maintained and that the ban be extended to colostrum from these cattle.
The report was based on scientific research by scientists from the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The studies were conducted on herds where there had been incidents of BSE as well as in laboratory tests.
The report points out that there is sheep to sheep transmission of scrapie - considered to be the most likely source of BSE. But it argues that there is no evidence that colostrum or milk carry the infection and that experiments point to the cow's placenta as the most likely source of transmission.
The veterinary committee's ruling comes as the European Commission prepares to overhaul farm and consumer policy-making in response to criticism it failed to act decisively over BSE. The first change will take place when Mr Franz Fischler, agricultural commissioner, hands over control of the scientific food and health committees, including the veterinary committee, to Ms Emma Bonino, commissioner for consumer affairs.
05 Mar 97 - Private cash backs Dolly sheep clones
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Telegraph ... Wednesday 5 March 1997
Offers from big business to back the "Dolly" sheep-cloning project have been made in the wake of the decision by the Ministry of Agriculture to cut funding.
News that private backers may support the project came as President Bill Clinton banned federal funding for research into cloning humans and called for a voluntary moratorium, closing an ambiguity in American restrictions that do not ban the procedure used to make Dolly.
The team that made the breakthrough at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, was told last week by the ministry that its funding - currently £252,000 - will be halved next month and withdrawn next year. The loss of funding is all the more surprising because the team was discussing with the ministry how to use the technique to aid research on BSE and how it may have arisen from the sheep equivalent spongiform disease, scrapie .
"We have had letters out the blue offering us money," said Prof Grahame Bulfield, Roslin Institute director, yesterday. "So far they are only from Britain." Prof Bulfield and Dr Alan Colman, research director of PPL Therapeutics, which collaborated in the Dolly project, will discuss funding when they meet the Commons science and technology committee tomorrow. MPs will also be told how one of the first applications could be in helping to unravel the biology of BSE and scrapie .
One future possibility is to use genetic engineering with cloning to knock out the prion gene - one linked to BSE and scrapie - from cows and sheep. However, Dr Colman said the short-term application could be to create strains of sheep with modified or deleted prion genes to investigate the fundamental science of scrapie, which has been linked to BSE.
To create a national flock immune to the disease "might take a century and would raise lots of issues about genetic diversity," he said. He said that it was not well understood if the animals could cope with the loss of the gene, because its role was still mysterious.
ï Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are trying to clone a cow. Dr Neal First said the team had created three embryos by fusing foetal skin cells, or "donor" cells, with unfertilised eggs. But "it's hardly newsworthy," Dr First said, noting that the Roslin team that cloned Dolly made 277 attempts before succeeding. If the embryos survive, they will be implanted into cows' wombs. After 10 months of gestation, the team could end up with a calf.
05 Mar 97 - EU scientists agree that British milk is safe
By Helen Cranford in Brussels
Telegraph ... Wednesday 5 March 1997
Government claims that British milk is safe to drink were confirmed yesterday by the European Union's scientific veterinary committee.
The findings, endorsed by scientists from Germany, France, Holland and Italy, agreed with the World Health Organisation's conclusions that there is no evidence that bovine spongiform encephalopathy can be passed on through milk . The inquiry was ordered by the European Commission amid concern that BSE "could be transmitted from cow to calf through milk".
One study of pedigree beef suckler herds and the calves from cows with BSE found that none developed the disease, despite drinking an average of nine litres per day for up to six months.
A spokesman for Franz Fischler, the agriculture commissioner, said: "The conclusion is that milk is safe and that there is no evidence whatsoever that BSE can be transmitted through milk or milk products."
04 Mar 97 - Pig manure dumped at Hogg home
By Nigel Bunyan
Telegraph ... Tuesday 4 March 1997
A businessman has made a 12-hour round trip from his firm in Anglesey to dump three tons of pig manure at the home of the Agriculture Minister, Douglas Hogg.
Louis Heywood, who runs a beef fat processing firm in Amlwch, was protesting at what he calls Government mismanagement of the BSE crisis . Welsh Farm Foods has seen a £1.5 million turnover drop to £100,000.
On Sunday he drove to Mr Hogg's home at Kettlethorpe Hall in Lincolnshire to drop off the slurry. With Mr Hogg following him around his property, a riding crop in his hand, he claimed "a victory for the industry".
The minister did not request Mr Heywood's arrest, even when he accidently damaged his porch. "It is always sad to see people behaving foolishly," said Mr Hogg. "The Government has spent enormous amounts of money on trying to help the people affected."
01 Mar 97 - How now, mad cow
John Lanchester
Telegraph ... 1 March 1997
Last week Douglas Hogg survived a vote of no confidence on his handling of the BSE epidemic. John Lanchester examines the origins of the catastrophe, and asks why the Government consistently ignored the disease's link with cannibalism.
At an early point in my dealings with Richard Sibley, an energetic and articulate 42-year-old English veterinary surgeon, I made the mistake of using the phrase "mad-cow disease". "That word is an absolute misnomer," he said, his grey eyes glinting. "These cows are not mad. If you want an easy name, I would prefer to call it worried-cow disease, or anxious-cow disease. The standard shot of this poor cow is all wrong." He was referring to a now-famous video clip of a visibly distressed black-and-white animal - named, it turns out, Daisy - staggering around a farm pen and falling to her knees. What is so upsetting about Daisy is that she looks so upset, as if she knows what is happening to her but cannot understand it.
This icon of mute suffering gets a thorough televisual airing whenever mad-cow disease - properly known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE - surfaces to public attention. The most shocking of these occasions was on March 20 last year, when the Government announced evidence of a link between BSE and 10 deaths from a new human brain disease .
Nobody involved in the British cattle industry is especially fond of the term "mad-cow disease", which is a horribly effective mini-slogan in itself. In most cases, the objection is based on the damage that the term has done to business. But Sibley was forbidding me to use the phrase on the ground of its factual inaccuracy.
"Very few cows ever got to the stage that this thing did on the TV," Sibley declared, and he should know. His practice is based near Tiverton, in Devon. This area, with 50 inches of rain a year, is one of the wettest parts of England; it is lush, prime dairyland, and because BSE has, in the main, been concentrated in dairy herds, the area has had more cases of it than anywhere else in the British Isles.
As a result of being at the epicentre of the BSE disaster, Sibley has been intimately involved with formulating the vets' response to the disease. He co-founded the BSE committee of the British Cattle Veterinary Association, which has had considerable influence on government policy since the announcement on March 20.
"One of the attractive things about dairy farming is that these guys live with these cows day in, day out," Sibley said. We were standing in a cowpen, visiting a farm in Venny Tedburn. Sibley was checking cows that had recently given birth for signs of postpartum infection. "They're milking them twice a day, sometimes three times a day, and they come to know their animals very well. Some of the time, I come to know them well, too." As we spoke, he had one arm inserted as far as the elbow inside a cow's vagina.
"They're very nice creatures to work with," Sibley went on. "You very rarely get a nasty cow. They do what they're told, they turn up twice a day and volunteer to come in. As long as you feed them, give them a dry bed, and look after them, they're very obliging animals."
"What farmers first noticed about BSE, and what they often found highly distressing, was that the character of the animal changes. In fact, the symptoms of BSE vary according to the original nature of the animal. The 'mad' cows have generally been pretty mad before they contracted BSE. If they are wild before they get it, they suffer more exaggerated symptoms; the very quiet, subdued animals tend to show milder early signs.
"The farmers all notice it. Cows are creatures of habit. They tend to come into the milking parlour in the same order each time - but infected cows hang back. They don't feed quite as well. They stop ruminating, they stop cudding, and that leads to digestive upsets. They lose condition, and their milk production falls. All those things show up before they ever show any nervousness, or madness .
Daisy's video clip belongs to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). She is one of the very few mad cows that most people will ever see, because BSE is a notifiable disease. A farmer who suspects that he has a case is legally obliged to notify MAFF, which will then send a government veterinary surgeon to inspect the cow, usually on the same day. If the cow is judged to have BSE, it is killed on the spot with an injection of barbiturates.
From this point on, the cow is the property of MAFF and of the British Government. The MAFF vet arranges for the cow's head to be cut off for a postmortem; the rest of the carcass is incinerated. This has happened to 163,000 cows since BSE was made a notifiable disease, on June 21, 1988 .
Sibley showed me his own video of a cow whose BSE he had diagnosed in July. Despite being such large and docile animals, cows have a highly expressive physiognomy. Their faces and their body language are easily read and full of character - which explains why farmers can become so fond of them - and their normal countenance when they are confronted by a human being is one of a disinterested but benign curiosity. Typically, the first symptom of BSE is an appearance of anxiety.
"She looks depressed," I said, as we watched his video.
"That's one way of putting it. Farmers usually say they look worried."
The cow's head was hanging, and her movements had a quality that was simultaneously jumpy and slowed-down. She was frowning - her brow was furrowed - and her movements were somehow tentative; she seemed to be nervous about where to put her front feet. When another cow came up behind her, she started and looked alarmed. There was a shaking movement across her shoulders. Sibley's diagnosis of BSE meant that the cow had to be destroyed.
The first known case of this mysterious new cow disease was seen by Colin Whitaker, a veterinarian in Ashford, Kent, in April, 1985 . Sibley saw his first case in August, 1986, in a cow that belonged to a dairy farmer named Trevor Cligg. "They laughed at me when I said, 'This cow, the expression on its face has changed,' " Cligg, a smilingly wary Devonian, told me. The initial diagnosis was magnesium deficiency, the symptoms of which are nervousness and disorientation. But the treatment had no effect.
"Then we thought it was some brain tumor, or an abscess, or listeriosis, but every test we tried turned up negative," Sibley says. The cow had increasing difficulty in standing or walking and after six months had to be destroyed. (Cligg, whose herd numbers about a 100 cattle, eventually lost 15 cows to BSE.)
This was the start of what was to become a full-blown epidemic, in which 903,000 British cows contracted BSE. At the beginning, however, there was only a steady trickle of similar cases. "There was something very odd about these cows," Sibley said. "All of us said we'd never seen this before." The affected animals rubbed parts of their bodies against walls or fences. They began to shake and tremble; their sense of balance was impaired. After about six months, they could no longer get to their feet, and at that point they were slaughtered.
In November 1986 the British Government's Central Veterinary Laboratory, in Weybridge, Surrey, announced a diagnosis of the disease. Autopsies on the brains of affected cattle showed holes and lesions characteristic of a kind of disease called spongiform encephalopathy - in plain English, spongy-brain disease. A year later, on October 31, 1987, the Veterinary Record published the first account of the malady. By the end of 1987, there had been 420 confirmed cases of BSE
BSE had now been identified as one of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs ("transmissible" because they can be transmitted from one animal to another; "spongiform" because autopsy shows that the victim's brain has sponge-like holes all through it; and "encephalopathy" because they affect the brain, the encephalon). The best-known human disease in this family is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which was first diagnosed in 1920, and which affects roughly one person in a million. Other species have their own TSEs: mink suffer from transmissible mink encephalopathy; deer from chronic wasting disease of deer. All are characterised by progressively severe psychomotor dysfunction .
These diseases have some other disturbing characteristics: they are undetectable before they develop, cannot be alleviated or treated in any way, and are invariably fatal . In addition, it had been known for decades that some TSEs have the ability to cross over from one species to another. And because we could now be reasonably sure that BSE-infected cattle were getting into the human food supply, there was prima facie cause for concern. The fear was that infected beef might cause a similar illness in humans - specifically, that it might cause an epidemic of a human TSE
This was a possibility that the Government, that is, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food - was loath to acknowledge . MAFF is, awkwardly enough, responsible for both sides of the food industry and is expected to show equal concern for producers and consumers. This it is widely seen as failing to do.
The British cattle industry is worth £4 billion a year and employs a 136,000 people; in its handling of the BSE crisis, MAFF has appeared to regard those facts as paramount . The ministry's line, from the discovery of BSE until March 20, 1996, was that there was no immediate cause for alarm. It argued that the probable source of the BSE outbreak was a spongiform brain disease called scrapie, which is found in sheep; and although scrapie had been known about for more than 200 years, no human being had ever come down with it.
In the Ministry's view, scrapie had possibly crossed over into the cattle population. The official formulation of this view came from a committee chaired by one Sir Richard Southwood. "From present evidence," the Southwood report declared in February 1989, "it is likely that cattle will prove to be a 'dead-end host' for the disease agent and it is most unlikely that BSE will have any implications for human health."
Before long, MAFF was confident that it knew where BSE had come from: its epidemiology showed a link with animal-feed suppliers who used a product derived from the rendering industry - "rendering" being what happens to a cow after it has been slaughtered and cut up for meat.
The sequence of events is this. When a beef animal is about two years old, or a dairy cow is around six years old, it is sent to a slaughterhouse. (About 40 per cent of the meat products in Britain are provided by the dairy herd - cows that have come to the end of their useful, milk-producing life.) The animal is killed with a shot to the head from a gun with a captive bolt; then it is hoisted up from the ground, and its throat is cut. The animal then moves down a disassembly line, where it is "dressed": first skinned, then decapitated, then gutted, then cut in half down the backbone by a power saw. At this point, there is a pause of up to 36 hours, since the carcass needs to spend enough time in a cooler to reduce its temperature to below 45°F before it can be further cut up to provide edible joints of meat.
Now the carcass is addressed with various saws and knives to produce the cuts of meat which stock supermarket displays, like steaks, ribs and offal. And then there is an unlovely thing called "mechanically recovered meat", referring to the last edible fragments of the carcass, which are extracted by a high-powered water spray and contain soft tissue and bone fragments.
"Unfortunately," Sibley says, "the BSE story has uncovered some pretty dodgy practices within the beef industry, such as sticking these bits and pieces through a machine, churning them up and producing some sort of grey slurry, which was then coloured and reformulated and was legally called meat." It is this mechanically recovered meat that is believed to have contained some of the most infective parts of the animal, especially the spinal cord .
The very last, unsaleable remnants of the animal then go to the rendering plant, where they are treated with high-temperature cooking to convert them into something that somebody will want to buy. "One thing the BSE publicity has brought up is the amazing diversity of products that have beef in them," Sibley points out. "You eat your Imperial mint thinking, 'Yeah, I'm a vegetarian,' but in fact it's packed full of gelatine, which is a beef-derived product. People have had nasty surprises - they didn't realise what they were eating a lot of the time."
The list of beef by-products produced in rendering is extraordinary: besides gelatine, which is used in sweets, mayonnaise, lipstick and ice-cream, it includes collagen (used in sausage casings and glue), tallow and fat (soap, deodorant, detergent, linoleum, insecticide, margarine), and keratin (shampoo) .
One other main by-product of the rendering process is something called meat-and-bone meal, or MBM, which consists of the cooked and ground-up remains of processed carcasses - often those of cows but also of sheep, chicken and other livestock. Feed mills buy the meal and make it into a crunchy, toasted, breakfast-cereal-like substance. It was this feed that proved to be the source of the BSE epidemic. (What follows repeats the standard scientific version of the BSE epidemic - which, I should say, has some impassioned critics, many of whom think that the use of organo-phosphate chemicals is implicated in the creation of BSE. These views are not taken very seriously by the mainstream scientific community.)
To a layman, there is something disturbing about the use of MBM - after all, cows were being fed other cows, in a processed-food version of cannibalism. But when you talk to farmers you realise that before the BSE outbreak almost every country, including the US, used MBM to feed cattle, and that it had been used in Britain since before the Second World War. At the same time, most farmers will not admit that they knew what was in the stuff.
"If these bags of food had written on them: 'This product contains mashed-up cow brains', nobody would have touched it," Sibley says. "Instead, it had written on it: 'Protein content 22 per cent .' "
Given that meat-and-bone meal is used all over the world, though, its employment in the UK cattle industry does not explain why the BSE epidemic struck in Britain. The reason seems to lie in a change that was introduced in the British rendering industry during the Seventies and early Eighties. Rendering plants stopped treating their animal matter with chemical solvents, which had been used to increase the yield of tallow and fat, but were (ironically enough) considered unsafe for the rendering-plant workforce.
The disease came from something that was being processed through the rendering plants -either sheep infected with scrapie (of which Britain has long had a relatively high incidence) or some hitherto-unknown cow disease, which was recycled through the feed and fed back to other cows. The rendering process was expected to kill any infectious agent, but if it did not, it was unimprovable as a way of creating an epidemic.
"The theory of the spread of BSE could easily mean that there was just one original BSE victim," Sibley says. "If you think of the infective dose - less than one gram of infected material - a cow brain weighing perhaps a kilogram has the potential to infect a 1,000 other animals. And then, of course, you get massive distribution when all those infected cows are fed back through the rendering system in turn." The maths is easy: if a rendered cow gives the disease to a 1,000 other cows, which then are rendered and give the disease to a 1,000 more cows each, within two generations we have a potential host population of a million BSE-infected cows.
The bad news about meat-and-bone-meal feed was known by the summer of 1988. On July 18 of that year, the use of MBM in ruminant feed was banned in Britain. And that, from the Government's point of view, should have been that. By now, the ministry was convinced that they knew where BSE came from (namely, MBM) and how to stop its spread (by keeping MBM out of cattle feed); when the Southwood report announced, in February 1989, that cattle were likely to be a "dead-end host" for the infectious agent - well, just how much good news can you take?
This comforting account of BSE, however, caused some rumbles of dissent.
The government-appointed Southwood committee mysteriously included no experts on spongiform encephalopathies. The quality of the committee's conclusions, which formed the basis of government policy, may be judged by their prediction that the cumulative total of infected cows would be from 17,000 to 20,000 cases. That, we now know, was wrong by the impressive margin of 4,515 per cent .
To critics, the view that the disease was unlikely to cross over into other species was premature and potentially dangerous, since it had long been known that TSEs can change their range of possible hosts when they are passaged through species. (The critics had cause for concern: BSE, unlike scrapie, is extraordinarily transmissible, and has so far been successfully given to pig, sheep, goat, mouse, nyala, kudu, gemsbok, Arabian oryx, eland, puma, cheetah, scimitar-horned oryx, ocelot, macaw, marmoset and macaque monkey .) This could have grave implications for human health, since at this stage infected beef was passing freely into the human food supply - the ideal condition to create a human epidemic if BSE turned out to be transmissible from cows to people.
01 Mar 97 - BSE poses no risk
Health
Telegraph ... Saturday 1 March 1997
Acknowledging this as a theoretical possibility, the Southwood report called for measures to exclude "known affected cattle" - ie, visibly sick cows - from the human food supply, but at the same time it concluded that "the risk of transmission of BSE to humans appears remote". In its attempt to downplay that possibility, the Southwood report seemed unreassuringly eager to reassure - a sign to many that it had been co-opted by the culture of MAFF .
To quieten worries of this kind, on November 13, 1989, the Government went beyond the recommendations of the Southwood report and passed a law requiring that the most infective parts of cows - "specified bovine offal," including the brain, spinal cord, spleen, thymus, intestines and tonsils - be removed from the human food supply. And with that the Government seems to have considered the problem solved. Between 1988 and 1991 it spent a paltry £3 million on BSE research .
The task, as far as MAFF was concerned, was not to ensure that British beef was safe - they thought they had done that - but to convince consumers to eat more of it . Abroad, this was an uphill struggle: by 1990, 15 countries, including the United States, had banned the import of British beef. Domestically, many schools and education authorities were forbidding the use of beef. Meanwhile, since the illness had a five-year incubation period, the number of cows identified as having the disease kept going up: 7,137 cases in 1989; 14,181 in 1990; 25,032 in 1991.
But the official line remained that BSE posed no concrete risk to human health. In 1995 John Major declared: "There is currently no scientific evidence that BSE can be transmitted to humans, or that eating beef causes CJD in humans. That issue is not in question." To understand why that degree of certainty was inappropriate, we need to look at what kind of disease BSE is. And this is where the story becomes truly strange.
01 Mar 97 - Euro Commissioner gaff
By Toby Helm and Joy Copley
Telegraph ... Saturday 1 March 1997
Emma Bonino, the European Commission's new head of food safety, caused another row between Brussels and Britain yesterday by declaring that a rapid lifting of the beef ban was "out of the question ".
The Brussels Commission, she said, would not consider recommending an end to the worldwide ban on British beef for "a long time ".
Last night a spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture expressed "great surprise" at the comments and said that the ban on British beef was unjustified. "British beef is the safest in Europe, if not the world," he said.
Ministers will be dismayed by Mrs Bonino's remarks as they were hoping that new British proposals sent to Brussels this week would pave the way for progress within a few weeks. Last night Euro-sceptic Tory MPs reacted angrily to the interview and Teresa Gorman, the MP for Billericay, said: "What is destroying our industry is the British Government's own supine attitude towards the Commission. We are like primitive savages trying to appease the gods with sacrifices of our cattle. It is humiliating for a member of the Government to go through this ritual to appease the unappeasable ."
In particular, the response from Mrs Bonino, better known in Britain for her attempts to reduce the size of the UK fishing fleet, will dismay Douglas Hogg who sent his plans to Franz Fischler, the agriculture commissioner, on Wednesday. Speaking to the French newspaper, Le Monde, almost exactly a year after Brussels embargoed all exports of beef and beef products from the UK, Mrs Bonino said: "It is out of the question to relax the embargo... We are not even thinking of lifting the embargo. And we will not think of it for a long time ."
Under the British plan, Mr Hogg said beef would only be exported from animals killed under the age of 30 months in herds that had either never had cases of BSE or had not had any for at least six years. In a letter to Mr Fischler, Mr Hogg claimed that Britain had fulfilled all the conditions of an agreement for the phased lifting of the beef ban agreed between John Major and fellow EU leaders in Florence last June.
Mrs Bonino's comments took some officials in the European Commission by surprise. A spokesman for Mrs Bonino said she was probably referring to the time that it would take to organise inspections of so-called "certified" herds in the United Kingdom. "If that is what she said to Le Monde then I do not want to deny that. Certainly it would take a long time before all the inspections could take place."
01 Mar 97 - Heretical theory
Health
Telegraph ... Saturday 1 March 1997
On April 9, 1982, the leading American scientific journal, Science, published a paper by Stanley B. Prusiner, a neurologist and biochemist based at the University of California, San Francisco. Prusiner's article was entitled "Novel Proteinaceous Infectious Particles Cause Scrapie," and it advanced a shockingly radical theory about the origin of the disease. Prusiner and his co-workers adduced evidence from a range of sources (principally, attempts to purify and isolate the infectious agent for scrapie) to argue that scrapie was indeed caused by something else - an infectious agent unlike any virus, or any known form of life.
"Because the dominant characteristics of the scrapie agent resemble those of a protein," they wrote, "an acronym is introduced to emphasise this feature. In place of such terms as 'unconventional virus' or 'unusual slow virus-like agent', the term prion (pronounced 'pree-on') is suggested. Prions are small proteinaceous infectious particles, which are resistant to inactivation by most procedures that modify nucleic acids."
According to the authors, the evidence supported the hypothesis that the "prion" contained no nucleic acid. It was simply a particle of protein that had mastered the knack of reproducing itself. This theory, the authors concluded, "is consistent with the experimental data but is clearly heretical". This was because, if the model proposed by Prusiner and his colleagues was correct, the prion was the only organic, self-replicating thing on earth not to contain any DNA or RNA (ribonucleic acid).
The prion theory - which is the sort of thing that wins Nobel Prizes once it is generally accepted - has been refined by subsequent research and hypothesising. It now goes something like this. We know that our bodies contain a protein called PrP, used in nerve cells; and we know that, in victims of TSEs, millions of particles of PrP have joined together to form agglomerations, known as plaques, in the brain. The PrP that makes up these plaques seems to be chemically identical to the protein we all have within us, but something about it has clearly gone wrong, and it behaves differently in response to a procedure called a protease test.
All this we know. The theory is that the lethal form of PrP - now known, following Prusiner's suggestion, as the prion - is a kind of evil twin. It is the same protein folded into a different shape, and it has the ability to make copies of itself. The prion attaches itself to a healthy particle of PrP and, through a sinister molecular origami, refolds it, and turns it into another prion. The new prion then attaches itself to another healthy PrP, refolds it into another prion, and so on. The end results are the cerebral agglomerations of protein, and hence the lesions found in all the TSEs.
The prion theory of infection posits both a highly complex process (so complex that we don't have a model of how it actually works) and a very simple one, because the infectious agent is much, much more primitive than the hitherto most stripped-down living entity, the virus. If a living creature (goldfish, wasp, human being) contains as much genetic information as a book, and a virus contains as much information as a few reasonably complex sentences, a prion contains as much as a single letter.
The prion theory explains a lot that was baffling about these transmissible brain diseases - prion diseases, as many scientists have taken to calling them. It explains why the infectious agent is invisible - undetectable by electron microscopes that are capable of spotting the tiniest viruses. It explains why the infectious agent is so much tougher than any virus.
It also accounts for the otherwise baffling multiple nature of these diseases - the fact that they can be sporadic and inherited as well as infectious. ("Sporadic" means that a disease can arise apparently at random, as if of its own accord. If you are marooned on a desert island alone, it is impossible for you to develop 'flu spontaneously, but you have at least a theoretical chance of coming down with a "sporadic" disease - for CJD, the chances are one-in-a-million.)
According to the prion theory, mad cow disease was caused by cows ingesting rogue prions via their feed, the prions coming either from scrapie-afflicted sheep or from some as-yet-undetected cattle TSE. Then people ate the infected cows, and the rogue prions got to work on them, too. Prion diseases thus make a horrible actuality out of the old slogan "You are what you eat".
Prusiner was not joking when he called his theory "heretical". If it is correct, it is one of the most important discoveries in biology this century. That said, the idea that TSEs are caused by prions alone remains controversial. Some scientists think the infectious agent is a tiny chunk of nucleic acid linked with a protein to make something called a "virion" or "virino". This is similar to a virus, except that it is unprecedentedly tough and small, and presupposes an unprecedented relationship with the prion protein.
The presence of a chunk of DNA or RNA would help explain why TSEs such as scrapie appear in different strains, just as viral illnesses do, with differing but consistent pathologies and symptoms. Fans of the virino ask how the "protein-only" hypothesis can explain that: surely there can't be several different kinds of magically re-folding protein? But this theory, too, is highly controversial. In short, almost everybody is sure that prions are intrinsically involved in TSEs, but nobody is yet certain exactly how.
01 Mar 97 - Holes in the brain
Health
Telegraph ... Saturday 1 March 1997
The first scientific account of kuru was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1957. Two intrepid doctors who had studied the Fore, D. Carleton Gajdusek and Vincent Zigas, described the disease and pointed out some of its unusual features, one of which was that kuru affected mainly women and children; less than five per cent of its victims were adult men. The only postmortem abnormality apparent in the victims was that they had holes and lesions in their brains.
"Governmental control of this region has existed for five years or less, and before that cannibalism, inter-clan warfare and ritual killings - remnants of all these still survive -were prominent features of Fore culture," the doctors noted, and the significance of these customs was soon clear.
Gajdusek and Zigas discovered that the disease was spread by the Fore's cannibalism - specifically, by their ritual of handling and eating the brains of freshly deceased relatives. Women contracted the disease by eating the brains, children by smearing the brains over themselves. (Men seem to have preferred muscle tissue.) Kuru gradually died out among the Fore following the abandonment of cannibalism, beginning in 1957, although, because kuru has a remarkably long incubation period, and perhaps also because of some anthropophagous recidivism, by the late-1970s the disease was still killing 40 people a year. It still claims victims today.
The crucial move in Dr Gajdusek's research, for which he was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine, was the demonstration that kuru was an infectious disease. (Gajdusek, in a bizarre twist to the story, is currently on trial in Maryland on charges involving alleged homosexual paedophilia with Melanesian children he brought to the United States.) In 1965 chimpanzees that had been injected with infected brain tissue contracted kuru. The discovery had a considerable scientific impact: since there are a number of diseases similar to kuru, the fact that kuru was infectious meant that those diseases, too, would probably turn out to be infectious. And so it proved. These diseases are the TSEs.
The discovery and explanation of kuru caused scientists to turn to one TSE in particular. This was the sheep disease scrapie, which has been a subject of on-and-off scientific attention since its first clinical description, in Britain, in 1732. The name refers to the way infected sheep often rub against trees, fences or walls, apparently to alleviate an unbearable itching sensation; the sheep also tend to suffer from uncontrollable trembling, hence the French name for the illness, la tremblante. Scrapie occurs in every sheep-rearing country in the world except Australia and New Zealand. The disease, however, has some other features that, when seen in conjunction with Carleton Gajdusek's news about the way kuru worked, started to make biologists ask new questions.
Once kuru was identified as an infectious disease, the assumption was that the pathogen was a virus; indeed, the 1977 paper in which Gajdusek described his Nobel-winning work was entitled "Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru." ("Disappearance" was a bit premature, given that 40-odd people were still succumbing to the disease each year.) Admittedly, kuru could be no ordinary virus: for one thing, viruses generally have an incubation period of days, whereas kuru took years, or even decades, to develop. Yet, with other microbial agents having been ruled out, there seemed no other explanation of the nature of the disease.
If kuru and scrapie were related diseases, however, the assumption that the infectious agent was a virus raised as many questions as it answered. For one thing, whatever it was that gave sheep scrapie was already known to be extraordinarily robust. You could do things to it that you could not do to normal viruses - a fact that was made clear in Scotland during the late 1930s, when 18,000 sheep were inoculated against louping ill (an inflammatory illness of the brain, spread by ticks). The inoculatory agent had been treated with a powerful disinfectant called formalin, but that was not enough to kill whatever caused scrapie, which was accidentally present in it, and 1,500 of the inoculated sheep subsequently came down with the disease.
Other experiments showed that scrapie could survive a process called autoclaving, or cooking under very high pressure and at very high temperatures - conditions that should have destroyed any normal virus. (Similarly, we now know that the infective agent for BSE survives rendering, which subjects it for extended periods to high temperatures.) It survived doses of radiation and of ultraviolet light such as no virus had ever withstood. Then, too, all known viruses produce an anti-body response: our body starts to fight the intruding DNA and leaves evidence that it has been doing so; the HIV virus, for instance, was tracked down via the antibody that fought it off. Yet no anti-body response to a TSE has ever been detected.
So the suspicion grew that scrapie - and, by analogy, the infectious agent for the other TSEs - was something new. Maybe it was a kind of weird supervirus; for a while, a theory about something called a "slow virus" was bandied about. Or maybe it was, well, something else .
01 Mar 97 - EC health chief's gaffe on beef ban
from Charles Bremner in Brussels
Times ... March 1 1997
Emma Bonino, the European Commission's new supremo for consumer health, landed herself in trouble with colleagues yesterday after declaring that the Commission was "not even thinking about" easing the embargo on British beef exports .
Signora Bonino's comment to Le Monde appeared to contradict the EU's commitment to start examining Britain's request this week to ease the embargo on beef from herds certified to be free of BSE. Embarrassed officials in the farm directorate and the office of Jacques Santer, the Commission President, said that the Italian commissoner was voicing a personal view .
Commenting on the British application, Signora Bonino told Le Monde: "It is out of the question to relax this ban. To tell you the truth, we are not even thinking about the question of lifting the embargo. And we will not think about it for a long time."
Her remarks, though a clear gaffe before she takes over her new job, do reflect the depth of opposition across Europe to any moves to relax the ban, in the light of intense public hostility to such action.
Britain's application is just beginning its long journey through the committees of experts and policymakers. But deep suspicion on the Continent over British veterinary practices is not helping London's case at the Commission .