Beef and the Mad Cow Disease Scandal. Introduction to the Beef Scandal.
Ministry secrecy 'led to an extra 250,000
cattle catching BSE' (16th March 198). Prof Roy Anderson, one of Britain's leading epidemiologists, told how 250,000 cattle were infected needlessly because he and his team were denied access to information which would have corrected flaws in the ministry's efforts to curb the disease. The scientific community felt at the end of the Eighties that getting information about BSE and CJD, the human form of mad cow disease, from the ministry was "like getting blood out of a stone", he said. Failure by Maff's Central Veterinary Laboratory to use "appropriate scientific methods" to draw up realistic calculations of the number of cattle that actually contracted BSE had led its experts to underestimate the true scale of the crisis. Prof Anderson, head of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease, said if these methods had been used in 1989-91, Maff would have spotted that the nationwide ban on feeding meat and bone meal to cattle - the suspected cause of the disease - was not operating effectively since it was introduced in 1988. He believed that nearly one million cattle had been infected with BSE by August 1996 - but many of them had been slaughtered for meat before they showed clinical signs of the disease. He thought that about 410,000 were infected after the feed ban. So far, about 180,000 cattle infected with BSE have been detected and destroyed to remove them from the food chain. Prof Anderson said: "Civil servants within Maff seemed very reluctant to seek our help or advice in the design of culling policies to further speed the decay of the epidemic or the conduct of risk analysis in the context of human health." He catalogued a list of failures since 1989 to gain access to the Maff database because some data was considered confidential. In 1996, he said, after the beef crisis broke, he gained access to the database only after approaches to Sir Robert May, the Government's Chief Scientist, Dame Bridget Ogilvie, director of the Wellcome Trust, and Sir Aaron Klug, president of the Royal Society. Prof Anderson called for a new "culture of openness" in Government science and said there should be a new system which would allow independent experts to step in whenever the Government did not have that expertise available within its own ranks.
CJD experts were ignored by
Whitehall (19th March 1998) David Tyrrell, former director of the Medical Research Council's Common Cold Unit, who was called in by ministers to head a team of scientists, told of the frustration at the delay by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Department of Health in publishing their recommendations. The Tyrrell Committee met for the first time in February 1989 following a recommendation by an earlier committee headed by Sir Richard Southwood, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, that a specialist group should set out urgent research priorities. Dr Tyrrell said his committee was asked to advise on work in progress or proposed on spongiform encephalopathies - the family of killer brain disease to which BSE in cattle belongs. The team was also asked to advise on additional work needed and to establish priorities for research. The report urged that it was "essential to set up a study of CJD and similar diseases and to maintain it for as long as necessary". The scientists felt that the CJD investigation should continue for between 10 to 20 years due to the long incubation period of the disease. They also stressed that it was important to check the assumptions that BSE was caused when cattle were fed rations containing the remains of sheep infected with a similar disease called scrapie. They wanted comparisons made of the behaviour of the agents causing both animal diseases. The report was submitted to both departments in June 1989 but had still not been published by the end of the year. It eventually appeared in January 1990. In a statement to the BSE inquiry, Dr Tyrrell said: "There had been no precise agreement on how it would be handled after that but we expected it to be published. Members did feel some frustration when it was still not released by the end of the year. . . We understood later that this was done so that, at the time of publication, it could be announced that all research was being funded. Meantime we had to put up with the inference of colleagues that nothing was being done."
Government gambled with publics health for 4
years (19th March 1998). Plans to control animal feed were scrapped (20th March 1998). Plans to tighten controls on the animal feed industry were blocked by the Ministry of Agriculture at the height of the mad cow disease epidemic five years ago, it was disclosed yesterday. On the second anniversary of the official announcement that BSE in cattle was linked to a new form of fatal brain disease in people- the event that started the beef crisis - the BSE inquiry in London learned that the proposals were dropped because they clashed with Conservative government policy to de-regulate the industry. The plans included setting up an independent committee to make sure that the industry was complying with the 1988 Government ban on feeding animal protein to cattle - which has been blamed for causing BSE in the first place - and other safeguards for animal and human health. Failure to comply fully with this ban has been blamed for prolonging the BSE epidemic and putting people at risk. A succession of Tory farm ministers stuck to the Maff decision, even though it clashed with the wishes of the Department of Health. The inquiry heard that Maff had originally agreed to set up an independent Animal Feedingstuffs Advisory Committee to monitor the industry - one of the main proposals made in June 1992 by an expert team of advisers headed by Prof George Lamming, Emeritus Professor of Biological Studies at Nottingham University - but then changed its mind. Prof Lamming said he and his team, which recognised that the feed ban was not working properly, were "extremely disappointed" with the response. The inquiry obtained a draft of a letter sent in July 1993 by Nicholas Soames, then junior minister of agriculture responsible for food safety, to Baroness Cumberlege, Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Department of Health, which said: "If we set up the proposed committee it is almost bound to recommend tightening regulations on other forms of controls. That is what committees do. Government 'misled scientists on BSE' (23rd March 1998).Scientists were misled into endorsing Government assurances in 1990 that beef was safe to eat, the BSE inquiry will be told in London today. They believed that controls aimed at preventing high-risk cattle material entering the public food chain were firmly in place. Unknown to them, the controls were often ignored. Beef for human consumption and ingredients for animal food were exposed to cross-infection by BSE. David Tyrrell will tell the inquiry that scientists were influenced by the Government ban on specified bovine offals imposed in June 1989. Dr Tyrrell chaired the Spongiform Encephalopathies Advisory Committee, the independent team of scientists appointed to advise the Government on BSE and its human counterpart CJD, from 1990 to November 1995. Under the Government ban a range of offals, including the brain, thymus, tonsils, spinal cord and spleen, which were deemed to carry the highest risk of harbouring the deadly BSE agent, should have been separated at abattoirs. All should have been stained and destroyed to prevent them entering the human food chain. It was not until 1995 that it dawned on the committee that the controls on offals were not working. Cases of BSE were increasing among cattle born after the 1988 ban on rations containing the processed animal remains that are believed to have caused the disease. Dr Tyrrell will describe an emergency meeting of the advisory committee in May, 1990, to discuss the safety of beef only weeks after the announcement that the first cat, a Siamese called Max, had died from a BSE-like disease. The meeting was to help Sir Donald Acheson, then the Government's Chief Medical Officer, prepare a statement for an urgent press conference on May 16. Dr Tyrrell said: "The view was that the present risk, which could not be said to be zero, was not greater than the risks of everyday life, and thus beef could be said to be 'safe'. The assumption was that the offal ban was now in place, though we minuted that it was important to ensure that regulations were implemented so that any cross-contamination of meat with the banned offals was minimised." In June 1990, the committee recommended precautions when removing the brains from cattle. On July 2, it also urged that it "made sense" to avoid contamination of meat with the spinal cord. On July 24, the committee concluded again that beef could be eaten safely. But it advised later that the eyes of cattle more than six months old should not be used for dissection in schools. On May 10, 1991, the committee noted the first case of BSE in an animal born after the cattle food ban in July 1988. In June 1995, as cases of CJD, the human form of BSE, were emerging in young people, the committee was becoming increasingly worried about the rising proportion of cattle born after the feed ban that were suffering BSE. While total cases were falling, 40 per cent of the cattle victims had been born after the ban. Epidemiologists found that cross-contamination could occur in feed-compounding plants. Then, the first report of the newly formed Meat Hygiene Service revealed a range of faults in the processing of meat.
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