The history of BSE, although short,
is a terribly twisted one, filled with poor decisions and a terrible
underestimation of the danger the disease posed. The first officially
recognised case of BSE occurred on
a farm in Surrey towards the end of 1986. The
existence of the disease was made public the following year,
and a committee was setup by the MAFF
to investigate the disease and its implication further, and to
put forward measures to safe guard human and bovine health. It
was also in 1987 that the number of reported cases of BSE
began to increase dramatically, and infected animals were reported
in nearly every corner of the UK.
In 1988, with public confidence in beef starting
to drop, a number of politicians publicly stated that there was
no risk to humans from BSE; that it
was just a form of scrapie, and
scrapie was harmless to people.
As yet though no research had been completed to prove this either
way. The MAFF committee on BSE
also made its first recommendations in this year, and a ban was
put on all bovine material being used in bovine food stuffs as
this was thought to be aiding the spread of BSE.
This ban however only applied to food to be fed to cattle in the
UK, so many meat and bone meal producers continued using cow meat
in their products for export. It has also been since discovered
that the ban was not taken seriously at the time and as good as
ignored in many circumstances. Compulsory reporting of BSE
cases was also brought in, with ½ the value of a healthy
cow being given to farmers as compensation.
1989 saw the foundation of a second British
government committee on BSE, the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee
(SEAC), which immediately proposed
a complete ban on certain offals entering the food chain from
cattle (brain, spleen, thymus, gut and tonsils). It also advised
that all carcasses found to contain traces of BSE,
or cattle suffering from the disease should be destroyed, either
by incineration or burial. Tests to detect BSE
in meat though were very difficult and took about 14 days, meaning
only cattle with noticeable symptoms were guaranteed in being
picked up. Compensation was also still only 50% for farmers, so
many would have been unwilling to declare cases in their herd.
Also in 1989 the first evidence that BSE
could transfer to other animals surfaced with the infection of
mice in a lab, and the emergence of ZSE
in some British zoos after captive animals were fed meat and bone
meal. The first case of BSE was diagnosed
in Ireland towards the end of the year and almost immediately
control measures were brought in at the beginning of 1990.
Irish control measures brought in at the start
of 1990 included a total ban on meat and bone meal feeds to cattle,
the destruction of all animals in a herd where BSE
was detected and a ban on imports of cattle from the UK. In Britain
the 'beef scare' began in earnest, fueled by huge media hype,
and public consumption of beef dropped to its lowest since the
early sixties. A special team was set up in Edinburgh to monitor
TSEs in humans, especially CJD,
in order to detect if BSE was giving
rise to any new cases. The British government increased the compensation
to the full value of a healthy cow, and reports of cases began
to top 300 a week, and later in the year they were forced to raise
the payments again. World confidence in beef from England also
began to drop as BSE was shown to
have crossed to cats, giving FSE,
and a marmoset monkey dies after being inoculated with the BSE
agent in a lab. The Germans became the first country to ban the
import of beef from Britain, and the offal ban was extended to
export products.
In the face of mounting pressure and hysteria
in 1991 the UK authorities seemed to try to defeat the problem
by denying there was any threat and researchers were told to stop
their study into the threat of BSE
to humans. A cow is shown to be suffering from BSE,
even though it was born after the feed ban, and there are growing
fears that the epidemic will spread to the rest of Europe through
exports of live cattle and feed. The price of cattle carcasses
drops quite severely due to the BSE
scare with some knackers charging £40 to take away dead animals
as compared to paying £30 for them before 1990. The MAFF
also put an across the board ban on the use of specified beef
offals in anything, as they had been used in some fertilisers
and feeds for other animals up till now.
Two more zoo animals, a cheetah and a puma,
die of ZSE caught from their food.
1992 is the year when the reports of BSE
cases in cattle reach a peak with up to and over 800 cases a week
being reported, and the bill for compensation payments to farmers
passed 74.4 million. Questions also began to be asked in the medical
profession as to whether BSE should
be declared as safe to people, given that so little was actually
known about the disease.
Changes were made in the way cattle were sold
in the following year with on the spot vets being replaced by
a computer controlled tagging system that could be used to track
if a cow was, or had been part of an infected herd. Farmers also
began not to be asked whether their cow came from an infected
herd at the auctions, and this led to a slight increase in beef
prices. Also in 1993 it is discovered that two farmers that had
owned BSE infected dairy herds had
died of CJD.
1994 was the year that mass hysteria took
hold as the public learned of Victoria Rimmer, a 16 year old from
Wales that had died of CJD, which
was linked to her having eaten infected beef. The computer system
set up to track cattle was also found to be completely ineffective,
unable to properly track whether the animals were from an infected
herd or not, and unable to give out the information it did have
to anyone but abattoirs for 'data control reasons'. The number
of cattle developing BSE which were
born after the food ban continued to rise and it became clear
that a large amount of vertical transmission
was taking place. Allegations were made that vets were being put
under pressure to sign certificates of health for the cattle without
having inspected them. It also became clear that beef being exported
from Britain was not being checked to make sure it had not come
from a BSE infected herd. The EC finally
imposed a restriction on beef exports from the UK, stating it
must be proved that the meat was coming from a herd unaffected
by BSE for 6 years.
1995 was the year in which people began to
realise that the feed ban had been implemented too late. It was
estimated that in 1992 and '93
up to 60% of BSE cases went unreported,
and that 90% of UK dairy cattle were in an affected herd. Two
more teenagers contracted CJD raising
fears that an epidemic was about to hit Britain, and it was estimated
that up to 1.8 million infected cattle from UK farms had been
eaten by people, 250,000 of these born after the feed ban.
This time last year it was finally officially
announced that ten people had contracted a new variant of CJD,
CJD2, and eight of them had died.
This was quickly followed by the complete EC ban on beef exports
from the UK. Public confidence in the authorities was seriously
rocked several times during the year with allegations that the
MAFF and other government agencies
had been concealing the true extent of the danger of BSE.
Also abattoirs and meat renderers were revealed to have been allowing
infected meats into human and bovine food, despite the government
bans that were in place. The British government and the EC spent
most of the year in a running battle over control measures with
the UK refusing to carry out a huge slaughter plan which the EC
insisted on if the export ban was to be lifted. In mid July the
SEAC released an estimation that
it would be 2005 before BSE could
be eradicated, a figure immediately seen as very optimistic. A
research group in London studying CJD2
discovered it to be of the same glycoform
as BSE, making it almost certain that
it is derived from infected beef. At the end of 1996 the British
government finally gave in and agreed to begin the cull of cattle
as ordered by the EC, measures that are estimated will cost over
3.2 billion pounds. For Ireland 1996 was marked by the exclusion
of Irish beef from a number of lucrative markets in the Middle
East and Russia after BSE cases rose
from an average of 17 a year to 73 last year
So far in 1997 there have been few large changes
in the state of play with BSE, the
huge cull agreed by the British has still not begun in any meaningful
way, although the German authorities have begun a cull of 10,000
animals imported from the UK after the first German born calf
(from an imported cow) contracted BSE.
The bans imposed on Irish beef exports are still mainly in place,
despite major diplomatic negotiations, the Russian ban has even
been extended. The one major scientific break through so far was
made by an Irish research company who developed and patented a
new, faster test for BSE. This test
which takes only 4 hours, compared with 14 days for the previous
one was developed by Enfer Scientific and now makes in-abattoir
testing feasible for carcasses, with up to 1,000 able to be processed
a day by a 4 person team using a process of Immunohistochemistry.
The total figures for reported cases of BSE
in the UK up till February of this year has been about 165,000,
while in Ireland only 188 cases have been reported in the same
period. Taking into account the estimates of unreported animals
in Britain their total could be over 325,000!
