Professor advises against beef or lamb for children
Pet food science censored by MAFF
CJD family files criminal charges of attempted murder
New chainsaw could have averted beef ban
Why the ban? "Are we being told the whole story?
Just how safe is Irish beef?
December 12 1997 BY MICHAEL HORNSBYA DISTINGUISHED scientist advised parents yesterday to encourage young children to eat chicken rather than beef or lamb because of the risks posed by "mad cow" disease.
Colin Blakemore, head of physiology at Oxford University and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, spoke as farmers were offered a glimmer of hope of faster progress towards easing the ban on beef exports. The European Commission said it was bringing forward talks on a proposal that could lift the ban in Northern Ireland, the region least affected by BSE.
The professor said that he had stopped eating beef more than ten years ago, and had now given up lamb as well:
"About a month ago, I decided I was not going to eat lamb because I felt there was sufficient evidence that BSE might have passed into sheep. However small the risk, I did not like the taste of lamb enough to feel it was worth taking." His own grown-up children had ignored his advice not to eat beef, but he added: "If I had a baby now, I would certainly not be feeding it lamb or beef."The fatalities from the variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease linked to BSE might be just the beginning, he said.
"The missing element is any certainty about the incubation period. If thousands are dying in five or ten years' time, which I hope will not be the case, the ban on beef on the bone will look very prudent."Earlier this week, a scientific advisory committee in Brussels suggested that most cuts of lamb on the bone from sheep over six months old should be banned in "high-risk" countries such as Britain. The Government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee is to consider whether there should be tougher controls, but is not expected to change its advice.
On Radio 4's World at One, Jack Cunningham, the Agriculture Minister, said: "There is no question of lamb chops, leg or rack of lamb, being off the agenda. They will continue to be available as now."
Jeff Almond, a microbiologist at Reading University and a member of the advisory committee, said: "I do not want to pre-empt our discussions, but we have been through all this before. The Brussels committee had no data we did not have."
On the committee's advice, the Government has already banned consumption of sheep brain, and from January 1 the spinal cord must be removed at abattoirs on animals over 12 months old. Lamb comes from younger animals.
Professor Almond still eats beef and lamb, and said the risk in sheep was entirely theoretical:
"How far do you push the precautionary principle? Are you going to knacker an entire industry on the strength of an entirely conjectural risk?"A former government scientist in the early 1990s told Channel 4's Dispatches last night that he and a colleague were forced to censor a paper they had written suggesting that BSE had passed to cats through contaminated pet food.
Iain McGill said they were made to remove pointers to a causal link with BSE, which has since been established. The Agriculture Ministry said last night that drafting changes were made but there was no attempt to suppress the information.
Thu, 11 Dec 97 COMTEX NewswireOTSU, Japan -- The family of a patient suffering from a debilitating brain illness will file a criminal complaint next week against two company heads for allegedly importing and selling dried dura mater, the membrane surrounding the brain and spinal chord, while knowing of its risks, the family's attorney said Thursday.
The CJD patient's husband, Sanichi Tani, 48, and his family plan to file the complaint Tuesday against the heads of the Tokyo- based companies on suspicion of attempted murder with the Tokyo District Prosecutors Office, Tani's attorney said. One of the companies is a defunct importer while the other is responsible for selling the product, according to the attorney.
Tani's 43-year-old wife, Takako, allegedly contracted the illness after undergoing a dry dura mater transplant, due to a spinal chord disease, at an Otsu municipal hospital in 1989. Last year, seven years after the operation, Takako began complaining of weak eyesight, and later fell into a coma and was diagnosed with CJD. Patients and relatives of CJD patients have already filed damage suits against the state and companies at the Otsu and Tokyo district courts.
It will be the first case seeking criminal responsibility over CJD.
Tani, a dairy farmer in Shiga Prefecture, western Japan, is also considering filing a criminal complaint against Health and Welfare Ministry officials who were in charge of approving imports and sales of dry dura mater, the attorney said. In November last year Tani filed a lawsuit at the Otsu District Court against the state, the Otsu municipal government and the two companies seeking 90 million yen in compensation.
CJD, similar to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or "mad cow" disease, causes a debilitating brain condition that affects the central nervous system and finally leads to death. There is no known cure at present. According to the ministry, there are 863 CJD patients nationwide. Among these, dura mater transplant operations are alleged to be the cause of 46 cases.
The Irish Times December 8, 1997 Kevin O'Sullivanннн A disgruntled reader wrote to the London Times after the British government banned beef with bone because of a possible link with BSE and, ultimately, the human version of "mad cow " disease, new variant CJD. One in 3.15 million British people had died from nvCJD, he noted, whereas one driver in 7,714 would be subjected to a road accident. He had only one thing to say: "Please pass the horseradish. "
Considering the lesser risk from BSE in Ireland - it has been estimated at one in 600 million over a year - the type of BSE controls operated here and the predominant view among both food and veterinary experts, one might be tempted to add: "Please pass on the horseradish, when you are finished with it. " But there is one factor that makes Mr Cowen's warning understandable, if not justified. That is the public health scandal that has dogged the body politic of late. And with it comes liability.
Britain has BSE, with little to suggest that it has got to grips with it. Ireland has had hepatitis C - an issue with which Mr Cowen still has to live - and may have a (pounds) 2 billion Army hearing loss payout to come, albeit in a worst case scenario. Factor in the notorious unpredictability of BSE and it becomes easy to reconcile how Mr Cowen says he would have no problem eating a T-bone steak, and yet as Minister for Health he recommends that beef on the bone should no longer be sold. His statement last week was "on public health grounds ". But possible liability lurks in the background. It may not be stated but liability is probably what prompted butchers and supermarkets to have bones removed from beef cuts by Saturday morning.
Prof Dan Collins of UCD Veterinary School, who is closely involved with BSE research and diagnosis, said the risk of spinal column material from cattle reaching the Irish marketplace is "very, very slim indeed ". He accepts, nonetheless, that Mr Cowen had advice he deemed necessary to act upon. He added: "I enjoyed beef for lunch today and will take it tomorrow and the next day if I can get it. " Having not yet seen the scientific basis for the British ban, Prof Michael Gibney of Trinity College's unit of nutrition and dietetics is reserving judgment. With European food scientists, he sits on the European Commission's scientific steering committee, the EU's most influential expert group on BSE policy. He said:
"All I can say is that some of the quality assurance schemes in operation in Ireland, particularly in supermarkets, would not deter me from eating Irish beef. "The Irish Veterinary Association, whose members monitor animal-derived food production, said the warning was unwarranted. IVA spokesman Mr Bill Cashman said there could never be a 100 per cent guarantee that any food item was completely safe at all times.
The Evening Standard (London) December 9, 1997 Urban chowboy HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALLJUST when you thought it was safe to go back in the butcher's, it turns out that one very small brain is enough to make us all mad.The undersized organ belongs, of course, to Mr Jack Cunningham. Who would have thought it was possible to find a minister capable of handling the BSE crisis with more spectacular incompetence than Mr Douglas Hogg? Step forward Labour's minister-with-over-reactive-knee-joint. The man is a dipstick, and his decision to ban beef on the bone looks like a lame kebab mounted uncomfortably on this inadequate skewer.
The evidence, for once, has been presented by SEAC, the Government Advisory Committee on BSE, in a clear enough fashion so that any lay person is capable of assessing its implications. The experiment which led to the ban was one in which "large doses " of BSE-infected material were fed to cattle, which subsequently showed traces of the disease in the spinal columns. All the cattle that were infected in this way were more than 30 months old. Given the precautions now in place in the production of beef cattle, how could any beef available to the consumer possibly be affected?
For more than a year now, no cattle over 30 months old have been allowed to enter the human food chain. Any feed that could possibly contain traces of the disease, let alone "large doses " of it, has long since been banned. So what possible reason could there be for the banning of beef on the bone?
Are we not being told the whole story about the current intelligence on BSE? That, in fact, the safeguards instituted by the Ministry of Agriculture in response to the initial BSE crisis are either proving inadequate in preventing the spread of the disease, or being ignored by unscrupulous farmers? If this is the case, then we may be on the brink of a scandal that will certainly cost Mr Cunningham his job, but far more serious than that, may cost British consumers their lives, and destroy our beef trade for decades to come.
But let's assume for the moment that Mr Cunningham is guilty only of frighteningly garbled logic. The inclusion in the ban of oxtail, an immensely popular cut of meat at this time of year, shows a mastery of misleading doublespeak. Even under the grim experimental conditions of being fed large doses of the disease, not a single animal produced traces of BSE in the tail bone. Imagine if Mr Cunningham had opted for a more restrained response to the new experimental findings by simply announcing the results of the work to the media and leaving consumers to make their own informed choice. One might have expected butchers to offer a "health warning " to their customers along the following lines: "Recent experiments indicate no evidence whatsoever that oxtail is now at risk from infection with BSE. Consumers purchase the product entirely at their own risk. "
The reaction of the public to the ban of beef on the bone shows precisely the contempt in which this hasty and ill-considered decision is being held. Far from having trouble shifting their beef, on or off the bone, most butchers are reporting a run on precisely those cuts which are to be the subject of the ban. "People are keen to get a T-bone on the table, " one told me, "before this ludicrous ban takes effect. "
Meanwhile, spare a thought for the nation's chefs. Every good restaurant kitchen has a pan of beef bones bubbling away on the back burner, providing the essential stock on which the finest cuisine is based. Many are understandably determined to defy the ban. "If I can find anyone to supply me with beef bones, " one Michelin-starred chef admitted to me, "then I will take them; I can't pursue my trade without them. "
Under different circumstances, one might regard such a statement as recklessly arrogant and irresponsible. As it is, there is only one individual in this sorry affair who deserves to be so labelled, and he is currently employed as Labour's Minister for Agriculture.
Sunday Times December 7, 1997 Steve Connor, Science CorrespondentTHE meat industry rejected a new chainsaw with two parallel blades that could have averted last week's "mad cow " crisis, according to the government's chief scientific adviser on BSE. Professor John Pattison, head of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC), said this weekend that using the double- bladed saw in abattoirs would have made it unnecessary to introduce the latest ban on the sale of beef on the bone. The chainsaw would have enabled the meat industry to remove spinal cords intact, along with the associated boney swellings of the dorsal root ganglia - which were recently found to be capable of transmitting BSE .
"If we had an operational machine that would do it next week it would have solved the problem very well indeed, " Pattison said.The Meat and Livestock Commission, which had been working on the double-bladed saw for nearly two years, said that technical problems over how to use the saw without stripping out the valuable portions of meat that run alongside the backbone led to the project being abandoned. Colin Maclean, director-general of the commission, said:
"The problem is that you would have to open the distance between the blades too wide to catch all the dorsal root ganglia because they vary in their distance from the spinal cord as you go down the spine. "This would have stripped out the most valuable cuts of meat. "If you had to widen the saw you would actually destroy quite large lumps of meat. We concluded that the saw had had it. The money you would have taken off the carcass would have been enormous. " Pattison said the risk of catching BSE from eating meat on the bone was already extremely low, but it would become so small within two years that he envisaged the ban being rescinded.
Cabinet ministers including Jack Cunningham, agriculture minister, will meet this week to consider the crisis. They will review public order at ports where farmers are protesting against cheap beef imports, and consider the prospects of securing more EU money for beef farmers. A source said: "Ministers have just been given figures showing the average farm income has dropped by 37% over the past year. "