Information given by individuals to others as gossip

Because it is gossip it must not be considered to be the absolute truth until it is checked in some way. This must not be taken as an insult to anyone as none is intended. There are no evil people involved in the subject whatever and everyone has taken large amounts of time and effort in carrying out what they feel is the best

However, what seems the best for the farmer may not seem the best for the consumer and what is best for the politician to keep the populus calm may not be the whole of the information that the populus feels should have been given. (a lot of farmers are, however, very honest and I would not pretend that it applied to all).

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1983
It is claimed that MAFF knew about BSE in 1983 but decided not to let the public (and possibly the politicians) know. This agrees with Helen Grant other heresay and with Dealler and Kent's calculated statistics.
First numerous cases of BSE not going to be announced.
They were found by a farmer in Surrey and reported to the local vet and hence to MAFF. They were slaughtered and the farmer was going to publish the data (in 1986). He was told not to do this and the information reached the Veterinary Record from the histopathologists in a small collumn in 1987. The reason why MAFF told him not to publish it is not clear.
No BSE available for research.
Apparently, the experts all over the world were asking MAFF for samples for BSE (after all they had a lot of it) but MAFF refused to play ball for the first few years fo the epidemic. A researcher from the US actually came over to the UK and got hold of the head of a cow with the disease, put it in his fridge and then took it back to california in his baggage. He was stopped by the guards at the airport and the head taken away. This may have shown the MAFF just what researchers will do to get a sample and may have pushed them to allow others some BSE.
Wilesmith's suggestion that BSE may not be from scrapie.
Everything that is published from the Central Veterinary Laboratory has to go to higher authorities to get permission. This one, in 1990 (?), did not get the permission and still stays with them. It is not clear why MAFF would prefer that information suggesting that they were wrong about scrapie being the immediate cause of BSE should be kept from the public and possibly politicians too.
The beefburger fed by John Gummer
, Then the Minister for Agriculture Fisheries and Food, he fed it to his daughter in front of all the cameras at the Houses of Parliament was actually largely turned down by her and he had to eat it himself. How he could have known that it did not contain infective material is not clear. The question arises as to whether the ministers have been told by MAFF what is actually going on.
Denials of BSE risk.
Bradley gave specific direct denials to the media in 1989-1994 that bovine brain tissue never reached British food and had not until then. Specific machines were available for the removal of brain tissue from the cranium. One of them seemed to be like a sort of claw and the other was a band saw that cut the head in half. It was well known that brain was used for the manufacture of human food and this was present in text books. Brain had a specific value as offal and as such was removed from the head for sale. It was said that the EC rules stated that brain was meat and hence could be used in various products that were claimed to be beef. Bradley denied this and said that brain could not be used in specific products.
Is BSE new at all?
Calculations show the first case of BSE to have been born before the change in the way in which bovine food was manufactured (1980/81). Originally it seemed that BSE infected the cattle when they were very young but this would be difficult if there was not BSE in the food! What might have happened is that the older cattle dying with BSE in 1990 might well have not become infected when young but rather when they were being fed large amounts of infective food to get them to produce milk. One group thought that BSE was not a new disease at all and was probably present in 1 of every 20,000 to 1 in 30,000 cattle. ANyway, both of the hypotheses would not fit well with scrapie being transmitted to cows to cause BSE.
Plum Island
When BSE was first announced the exported cattle that were moved to the USA were actually rounded up and taken to Plum Island when they were kept to see if they developed BSE and exports of live cattle to USA were stopped. At this time MAFF were stating that there was no problems with BSE and that nobody was worried.
Transmision of BSE by a bull?
A herd of cattle in Northern Ireland became had no cases of BSE. A bull brought in from England died of BSE but so did some of its offspring on the farm. It was as if the bull had infected its calves in some way.
Tissue from cattle was tested for BSE by inoculation into mice.
Only the brain and spinal cord tissue caused a disease in mice and this was used as an indication that there was no infectivity in the other tissues. This was clearly misleading but was shown to the press as proof that there was no risk to humans from eating bovine tissue. (1993 onwards)
Southwood not accepted
The 'Southwood' report (from the Working party on BSE, organised by the MAFF in 1987) was produced by spring of 1988, and was presented to MAFF. Apparently they were horrified by the report, which made heavy statements about how we did not know enough to be certain of the risk. It is said that MAFF put pressure on him to change the text in such a way at to make it clear that eating bovine tissue would not be a risk. This, it is said is the reason for the two revisions of the report, which not become reach Parliament for several months later, the reason for which is unclear.
Southwood sources
It seems that Southwood did not actually take information from the right sources to decide what to do about BSE anyway. Several experts were almost pulling their hair out when they saw the report, which said that no restrictions should be put on the consumation of brain, spinal cord, etc and that BSE would not go on to infect further animals. These are clearly ignorant statements and could not have been advised by anyone involved in the science.
Farmers have been much more worried about BSE than has been reported.
They feel that they have been treated badly and that, as there is no risk to humans whatever (as MAFF keeps telling them) why should they have to work hard and pay up to report the cattle? There is a great feeling that BSE actually came into the UK from elsewhere and that BSE is in fact prevalent in France but the french are not reporting them (apparently they are calling them cases of rabies).
Are BSE cases getting to MAFF statistics
After 1991 farmers that reported cases born after the feed ban of what they were certain were BSE (by this time many farmers had seen half a dozen cases) to the veterinary officer found themselves in a problem. The problem was that initially the VO would say that he wasn't sure that it had BSE and that it had to wait on the farm for a month when he would return. Then the VO came back to find that the animal was sick but could not be said to have certain BSE and so the VO turned it down. There the farmer was left with a sick cow, that could not be sold to anyone except for animal meat and would be worth less than 100, whereas when the VO was first called the farmer could have taken it to the market just looking a little low and got 800. The reason was twofold. Partly it was because the farmers were getting much better at spotting the initial changes in personality of the cow that preceded the clinical disease and the second was that the VOs had been told to be tighter in their selection of cattle. They were also told that there would be few cows born after the ban that showed BSE. Eventually, a particularly honest farmer called Lacey, saying that the VO had turned down a 'barn door' case and that he wasn't having it. Lacey had it slaughtered, the brain examined and it was clearly BSE.
Vets at markets
Initially vets were hired to be at the market for quite long hours inspecting cattle to make sure that clinically infected animals did not get sold. In about 1992/3 the time of the vet was dropped from 12 hrs to week to 2 hrs per week (one local vet that is known). Few infected cattle were picked up and it was not thought to be worthwhile. No farmer has been taken to court as if any infected animal was pointed out the farmer just apologised and took it home.
EC regulations were not enforced fully
The Germans and eventually the whole EC, in 1990 demanded that UK meat not be exported if it came from an infected herd. This was to be carried out by: 1 the farmer selling the cow at market would announce that he had a case of BSE on his herd within the previous 2 years and the price of the cow would drop accordingly. 2. The market would announce this to the buyer. 3. The buyer would not export the meat 4. The abattoir would supply certificates for any meat being exported, signed by a vet to say that the meat was not from an infected herd. In 1992 the workers at Smithfield and the meat groups marched on the MAFF and told them that this simply would not do. The reason was that such a high proportion of the cattle were from an infected herd (by this time it was probably 65%) that it was ruining the export and making such difficulty that things had to change. In around 1992 things seemed to change. The markets seemed to stop asking the farmers presenting cattle if they had had a case of BSE previously, they stopped putting ribbons around the cow when sold, the abattoirs happily exported them as if they were from a non-infected herd. Vets were put under pressure to sign the certificates even though there was no evidence that what they were saying was true. This all changed with Maria Hovi, (0734 667090) who was sacked after she refused to sign the certificates because they were not true. She made it plain that this was unacceptable.
Misleading data
The impression is that 55% of the dairy herds in the UK are affected at one time or another by BSE. It is a misleading impression, however, as the larger the herd, the greater the likelihood of BSE. In fact >90% of the dairy cattle in the UK are now from an affected herd.
Vertical transmission means that large numbers were infected
The number of cattle infected with BSE that are being eaten has been claimed to reach 1.8 million by 2001 but it is not realised that the figure is four times as great if the cattle become infected from their mother.
USDA
The USDA was determined to carry out as much as possible of the research into BSE in the USA and researchers there outside the USDA had trouble at times getting funding or samples to carry out experiments.
USDA research
Workers at the USDA have been under pressure not to find out what is actually going on with BSE. For instance they were told to feed the mink some amounts of bovine brain to fid out how much was needed to transmit the disease. In their publications they say that they tried out down to 1g (which still worked). This is extremely unlikely. Anyone carrying out this sort of experiment will use doses much lower than this, probably 1000 times lower. Perhaps the USDA does not want the results to be published??
Experiments not done
Numerous experiments into the risk of BSE to humans have not been done and some have been done that have turned out to be useless. For instance: No measurement of the amount of infectivity in tissues was done properly until 1992 (far too late). No measurement of the amount of specific tissues needed to infect specific animals (sometimes done with grossly too high amounts, officially). No range of animals tested with BSE to work out the chance of transmission to humans. No transgenic mice made to look for methods of tissue testing. Cattle have not actually been fed specific amounts of bovine meal as a test to see if this is the way they become infected. No infectivity has in fact been found in the meal at all.
No replies from officialdom
Various groups have written to the Minister of Agriculture and not received replies. Dr. Dealler wrote to Wilesmith at his parliamentary address, at his constituency address and at the MAFF and got no reply.
Tyrrell
Attempts made to get in touch with Tyrrell have been difficult and it has been worrying that he seems to have been believing everything told to him by MAFF. At a meeting he stated that the mouse assay for infectivity in tissue of cattle tissue should be thought to be 100% sensitive, a clear mistake but one put over by MAFF regularly to the press. Tyrrell used to run the common cold unit associated with Porton Down. Although a lot of work was done, it is not clear if we have less common colds.
A meeting between Wilesmith, Bradley, Tyrrell, Lacey and Dealler at the MAFF centre of the Royal Showground in 1993.
It was made clear that by Wilesmith that the cases of BSE born after the feed ban were simply due to bags of meal being kept for longer than expected. When asked, farmers said, however that they never kept bags for longer than 6 weeks because they generally rotted. Lacey made it clear that the Aspergillus fungus that would grow was unacceptable and the economics would make sure that the bags were not kept for any length of time. "do they think we're idiots?" Lacey growled to Dealler and pulled Wilesmith's arguments to pieces. Tyrrell claimed that he would not let ten thousand infective units of BSE into a human diet as this was shown to be an oral dose in some TSEs. Lacey explained that if 10,000 IU was not in a meal of 100g of food then they would have to use a test that would find 100 IU in a single gram and that was not possible by inoculating tissue into mice.
Cases in France?
They say they've had about 6. Farmers in the UK think they've had more. The Portuguese say they've had 12 but they are generally the offspring of imported UK cattle...and one that is the offspring of a Dutch cow. It is not clear how the infectivity could have reached them as other Portuguese cattle do not seem to be affected.
The case of BSE in a bull exported to Canada
In 1994 it was a shock. The response from the Canadian meat groups was severe.
The original cat with FSE
It was claimed that the cat that originally died of FSE did not eat any infective food at all. It was supposedly only given proper steak. Similarly, the puma and the cheetah that died in the zoo were not knowingly given the offal of infected animals. Could cats be particularly open to infection.
Before BSE got going there were only a few, specific groups in the world working on TSEs
. Meetings were of an eye scratching type, with one group trying to be one up on the other group. At one meeting one of the lecturers was picked up by his lapels and pushed off the stage. Now there are too many people involved to be the king of the castle and hopefully things will be less personally messy.
Daisy leaves in Bradford.
Dealler found a specific chemical in the leaves of the daisy with Nash. It was found to be active against HIV but he wanted it to be active against BSE. The children of Bradford collected hundreds of bags of leaves on the 'daisy day' in 1993 and the chemicals still lie in wait. Dealler could find no funding to go further.
MAFF knew the numbers of cases were not going away.
In order to find out if the case numbers is changing is actually much more difficult than it seems but MAFF had about 6 people (e.g. Linda Hoinville, Judy Ryan) at one time working on it at the Central Veterinary Laboratory. They must have known that things were not a good as seemed. It does not seem obvious, however that they told the politicians.
The computer was useless.
Originally it was a good idea that instead of all the information being given from one person to another about each cow, the farmer would put a tag on its ear and keep a record of what happens to it. A computer would keep all the records of deaths and farms etc. This was probably going to be used for the abattoirs to check if it came from an infected herd but it turned out that the information could not actually be released by the computer to anyone outside MAFF. The machine became a statistics machine and little else until the law was changed in late 1995.
Offal has a price.
Offal of various sorts is removed at slaughter in the abattoir. What happens to it then? It is very difficult to be sure and it is said that the offal may well end up in animal food. The fact that they have now demanded that offal is stained black by the abattoir may be an indication that MAFF can realise that they might not all be being destroyed as they should be.
Meat and bone meal.
MBM could no longer be used for bovine feed in the UK as of July 1988. So what happened to the meal? Well, it was just exported. Bradley put it over to the EC that it was sent to foreign parts to be used in soil fertiliser but the evidence for this is poor. The worry is that it got sent to Europe and that they will follow us with an outbreak of BSE.
Mechanically recovered meat.
MRM is the meat that is removed from the surfaces of bone after the abattoir workers have taken as much as they can. The effect is really quite large but contains fragments of bone and hence has a lot of calcium. Human food is always worth more than animal food and it is expected that MRM still ends up in human food. The worry is that MRM is likely to contain many tissues.
The use of bull's eye balls in school was recommended to stop (1995). But it was OK to eat.
Various schools refused to continue to give beef to the children (1994).
This was put down as rediculous by Meldrum and pressure was put on schools to change their ways. Various schools refused to do this (try some in the Hull area).
Sausages.
What is in your sausage? It is not exactly clear but it is expected to contain a fraction of many of the tissues that you did not otherwise eat (e.g. lungs). Some of these tissues are known in other species to be infective for TSE.
For some reason Lacey is no longer lambasted at lectures that he gives.
The media pulled him to pieces for saying that the cattle born after the ban would continue to be infected and for saying that we may find the ground to be infected (as with scrapie perhaps). It now seems that various groups are happy with what he is saying.
Dealler's argument with McLean.
McLean (then the top of the Meat and Livestock Commission in 1991) had given a lecture to the abattoir workers and the butchers in Bradford and stated that no infection had ever been found in meat. He had said that there was no possible risk to the workers and not to worry. Afterwards Dealler approached him and offered to make some kind of agreement; (?if McLean tells the truth then perhaps Lacey will stop spreading the fear. ??). Apparently McLean was determined that all the information concerning infectivity in meat was simply wrong and invalid. It ended up with Dealler shouting out of the door of the hall at McLean and his entourage heading for their car. Meantime, the workers were all talking to Lacey and were clearly unimpressed by McLean's denials.
Wilesmith claimed that there would be no cases of BSE born in 1992 and put his job on the line.
When a case appeared, and the EC demanded to know how, MAFF could not say but promised that there would be no more in 1993. There has now been one born in 1993 (and this is only around 2 years old so there will be plenty more. One neurological case has been reported to a VO in the west that was born in 1994. The farmer thought it was BSE but the VO didn't and told that he couldnt get any compensation. The farmer told Granada Television.
Hugh Frazer.
HF the expert in scrapie and other TSEs has now left the BBSRC Unit in Edinburgh. He has retired. This is a great loss as he was an excellent researcher. When BSE was first being investigated MAFF ordered him how to do the experiments (wrongly) but he had to do them that way. This is not the sort of man to lie down when retired and it would be a pity if he left. What a loss.
Honors.
Ray Bradley, who has been in charge of the BSE Unit at the Central Veterinary Laboratory since the beginning of the epidemic has been given the CBE...and now retired. Keith Meldrum has also (but not retired) and Rob Will has been made a Professor. Narang has been sacked, Dealler has had attempts made to destroy his career, and Lacey has been demoted. I hope that the winners are right.
Keep official sources quiet.
The Communcable Disease Report (CDR), which is produced by the Public Health Laboratory Service was determined to produce regular information on the BSE epidemic. They were told not to. A meeting there was a serious argument as to whether they should put up with the directions from above. This was obviously a public health matter and should be spread as information to doctors. It turns out that the whole of the PHLS were told to provide no information about BSE to anyone. No information could be obtained on BSE from the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Pathologists, the British Medical Association, the Royal Society, Environmental Health and many more. This was probably because of the effect the salmonella and listeria news outbreaks had. Originally when it was anounced that listeria was in cook-chill food, everyone rang up the PHLS and asked what it was. PHLS told them that it was a pathogen that causes a severe disease and is sometimes associated with outbreaks from food. This caused a press calamity. With BSE the way to handle it was to make sure that there was only one source of information and that was to be MAFF.
Consumers Assn.
The main group that kept needling the MAFF was the consumers association.
Richard Kimberlin.
He is more in charge than you think. An excellent scientist from the era of TSEs when interpersonal vengeance was known, is determined that the risk to humans from BSE is minimal. He left the research unit in Edinburgh in 1987 and set up his own company as advisor to other food groups, Governments, research groups, drug companies, committees etc. Unfortuneately this means that they have all heard the Kimberlin side of the story more than others.
Various BSE researchers in the UK have made it plain that they would not let their children eat sausages, meat pies, etc.
Infection in meat?
McLean stated that Dr. Pattisson, a veterinary researcher into scrapie, now deceased, was misleading when he stated that there was infectivity in goat meat with scrapie. Pattisson wrote back to the Veterinary Record making it plain that the meat taken from the goat was nothing but meat and it was injected into another goat. The second goat died of scrapie so there was infection in the meat. He told me that the real problem was that he carried out the experiment with a small herd of goats and was told to slaughter them when only a few years old. If only I had let them live on, he said, possibly all of them would have died of scrapie.
GPs.
Various GPs have made it clear that they will not eat bovine material and certainly not recommend it to their patients. One near Cambridge and one near York are determined.
Narang is now backed.
To MAFF's annoyance he is backed by a food manufacturer.
The information source for the media from MAFF is very poor.
Numbers can be got but information about diseases is difficult. There is a special telephone line at MAFF but this is limited in its value. Various researchers have needed some information from a vet locally and been referred to the Central Veterinary Laboratory. Here the researcher says they must speak to the manager, the manager refers them to MAFF, the MAFF demand that they speak to Kieth Meldrum. Its felt to be a tight ship.
Farmers want nobody to realise that their cattle are sick.
Although such a high proportion of herds are affected by BSE the farmers are still embarrassed. If they could, a farmer would sell his cow, with symptoms of BSE to an intermediate farmer (there was one near Ilkley and one in Cheshire) who would then announce the case to the veterinary officer and claim the compensation. Mean time the original farm did not have anything wrong with his farm. Originally MAFF took some trouble to prevent this but little has been heard since.
Vicky Rimmer.
She was with an incurable presenile dementing illness and now in a coma was first seen by the expert from the CJD Unit in Edinburgh when she was 16. He came and asked her grandmother questions about what was wrong and then told them not to tell anyone about the case. What he did not seem to realise was that Alan Watkins, the Today expert on BSE was actually in the room with them. Was this a cover-up?
An expert at MAFF applied to the Spongiform Encephalopathy Research Campaign for the post as the manager.
He/she made it clear that what MAFF was doing concerning BSE was quite unacceptable and that some of the things said were almost unbelievable. SERC wondered whether the appointment was genuine but the person seemed good.
London Zoo and its Kudu.
Dealler went to London Zoo to look at the Greater Kudu. Unfortunately the vet was out but one of the zoo keepers was there and showed him around. Apparently they were expecting to discard the top food of soil from the kudu pen because of infection remaining in the soil, all droppings from the animals had to be collected and incinerated, the man had to get changed before he entered and left, and anything that was dropped into the pen by a viewer would be incinerated too. This was at the time that MAFF was telling farmers that BSE would not remain endemic in their farms.
Tyrrell Committee.
For some reason there does not seem to have been specific groups invited to the Tyrrell Committee for advice concerning BSE. The most important one would be one of Medical Ethics (the people that decide what is morally acceptable), then the Medical Microbiology group, then the Infectious Disease, and especially Public Health. What is being discussed is a matter of public health. The reason why PH is not fully involved is not clear.
Death certificates.
Various relatives of people that have died of CJD have reported that the doctors refused to write CJD as the cause of death on the certificate. Some (for instance Mr. and Mrs. Churchill) were determined and demanded the change. Exactly why this is cannot be sure. We are told that recently the CJD people have been asking histologists not to report cases but I cant believe that this can this be true. It is also said that various cases of CJD have not reached the CJD unit records.
Two diseases??
Initially it was found that around 10% of the cases of BSE reported to MAFF in 1988 were not histologically true. This represented a few hundred. By 1993 it had risen to 15% of the cases but this was several thousand. So what was wrong with the other ones? How could the number of other fatal neurological diseases have increased remarkably at the same rate as the number of cases of BSE? Are we having two epidemics in parallel? Could it be that we are just getting the histology wrong?
Urine test.
A technique may have been found to look for the diagnosis of BSE by looking at urine. The experiment work has been stopped and the funding removed at MAFF.
Mawhinney.
In charge of the Department of Health he announced in 1995 that there would be no research into methods of diagnosis or treatment of BSE as this would simply be used to indicate that there was a risk to humans. He made no notice of the fact that we do not yet know if there is or is not a risk.
Germans are not so easily misled.
It was expected that the Germans scientists would not be misled by MAFF but when speaking to them. Dealler found that they too had believed many of the pieces of data that Bradley had put out (which were all essentially true) and took them to show that BSE was going away and there was little risk.
Questions not answered.
Meetings involving Linda Hoinville and John Wilesmith with the vets from the south of England were strained as they refused to answer some questions. For some reason the 'vertical transmission study', which will not now be able to show if there is any because both the control mothers and the test mothers are from the same herd, has finished but the results not arrived for publication.
Hogg the new minister
Hogg got in as the Minister of MAFF and must have wondered why. His wife has been disposed of by Major as an advisor and there had been a mild fracas. When arriving in the post he asked to see all the information about BSE. It is assumed that some of it was not as he liked and a press conference was announced saying that there was more infection in bovine tissue than they thought. No further data was given. Bradley said later that this was due to the oral transmission of BSE by 1g of brain tissue to another cow. Clearly this did not incidate more infectivity in the tissue, so there must have been some more information. Is the information fully reaching the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee? It is worried that the SEAC is being used to blame when things go wrong and their advice is more manipulated than wanted. One thing is clear from the way things happened is that Hogg might have wondered if anything was wrong when he got the job.
SEAC decisions.
The decisions made by MAFF and by SEAC early in the epidemic had to be on best guesses because there was simply not enough information to be sure of the risks that were being taken. It is not at all clear, however, how those best guesses were calculated. Dealler's calculations of the number of infected cattle that were being eaten was given to MAFF and SEAC 4 months in advance of the following SEAC meeting. Bradley was to send copies to all the members. They reached the members a week before the meeting and were little looked at. A letter was sent back to him saying that they could not accept his findings of human risk because they were calculated assuming cumulative doses of BSE and there was not proof of this. The problem with SEAC is that it has had to make decisions where there is inadequate proof. Anyone in Public Health would have accepted the findings as you must always assume the worst. Instead Dealler offered to calculate risks with non-cumulative doseas of disease. He received no reply. Could SEAC be looking on the bright side when the dark side is the PH line it should take? Are they going to be the fall-guys?
New test for CJD.
Narang claims that by looking at the urine of a patient under the microscope he identified the objects that were associated with infection. He says that he used simple local urine as controls and was happy. He felt that the test should be tried by many other groups and that he should be allowed to carry it out without the fight of trying to use a laboratory. "Why dont you use your garage?" said a local hospital manager.
Foreign cows.
A farmer with a number of cases of what he thought were BSE reported them to the VO. The VO ignored a few of them and when asked why, he said that they were foreign cows and therefore couldn't have BSE. Apparently MAFF has had pressure put on it to cut any budgets that it can and the compensation for BSE is one of them.
MAFF chases away experts.
Some researchers appeared from Edinburgh to a farm in the South of England to carry out electronic recordings of the brain waves of the cows suffering from BSE and those that were apparently normal. The reason was that this particular herd had had a large number of cases of BSE and nobody was sure why. Initially the vet reported to the Veterinary Record that there had been 12 cases and it was published. There was at least 60 by a few years later however. By this time it seemed that there was something special about the farm and they may be able to tell which cattle were incubating the disease and which were not so an agreement was made with the farmer. MAFF arrived to chase them away. The vet in charge of this farm described the tale in awful terms and actually moved house partly to get away from the problem.
Espionage??
The worry among the people outside MAFF/DoH has always been that they are at risk in some way. Letters have gone missing, computer discs, files, publications, and crackles on the line, but nobody is sure of any espionage. The publisher of Lacey's latest popular book about BSE seemed to vanish after spending a year of organising and few books were sold. A bit strange but not surely a spy. Dealler's manuscript was turned down for the Lancet but none returned. He found that the computer disc and the hard copy of the manuscript had gone from his office. Not exactly serious; he just rewrote it.
Update April 1996
Transmission to pigs?
The sheer idea of this must shake the MAFF to the core. The fact is that we eat pigs at a very low point in their normal life expectancy (generally about 4 months) and so the actual likelihood of significant amounts of BSE being present in the tissues are pretty slim. However, we also eat older sows and boars but in much smaller numers and a lot of the reaction to this disease is not totally logical anyway. It appears that scrapie has been transmitted to sheep orally (a french thesis) and although we are now 6 years into the study it is not being made absolutely plain that pigs have not succumbed. The Chief Vet Officer has not made this clear.
Vertical transmission?
It was never clear why the VT study was being done 'blind' i.e. so that neither the researchers nor the cattle knew which were the offspring of the cow with symptoms and which were the offspring of cows without. Blind studies are usually done if the researchers's knowledge might alter the outcome. But BSE is fatal and so this is very unlikely. The possibility is there but the significance is slim. The fact that the controls were the offspring of other cattle in the same herd is very had news indeed. The VT researchers are beginning to suggest that all the cows in a herd may well be infected and it is the offspring that we see with disease anyway. In that case there would be no difference between the two groups. All attempts by MAFF, if they found no difference between the groups, to say that 'therefore all the cattle (about 40 so far) that have succumbed have caught it from their feed' will be fought. It might be possible to get some useful data from this study but I think that it can now only bring bad news.
The press are moving in.
There appears now (April 1996) to be 4 major TV programs being organised, mainly by groups outside the tenuous control of the Government.
House of Commons Select Committee.
The health and agriculture committees met over the period from the beginning of April 1996 to around the end. It now appears that much of the data that they were given did not look good to the health side but the agriculture thought it was fine. Particularly this was the data from Professor Lang, who made it clear that there was no justification for the way that the MAFF had acted. Jerry Wiggin asked Dr. Dealler how he could justify his predictions of human pathogenesis from BSE and got a hail of statistics. Wiggin immediatly turned to Proffessor Pattison and asked if this could possibly be accepted. Pattison simply said that most of the logic was valid and Wiggin almost fell backwards. It now seems that the joint committees cannot agree on a report and will be putting all the data that they have been given out as the report itself. It will be long and tiring but all Dr. Dealler's data concerning the times at which MAFF knew what was going on but did not tell either Parliament or the population will creat some havoc.
Younger CJD again
It now seems that an even younger child than the one in Glasgow with similar symptoms may well be being investigated for CJD.
Public Enquiry
Lacey immediately demanded that the Government start a Public Enquiry into the way in which BSE had been handled. He has been completely ignored apparently for the time being.
Dealler's book. Lethal Legacy. BSE a search for the truth,
came out in April 1996 published by Bloomsbury. It had originally been about half as big again and the publishers decided to hack it back and call in the legal experts. Apparently there were about a dozen places where the author was distinctly sailing too close to the wind and they had to be calmed down. The book was accepted for publication and reached the shops within 3 weeks.
Narang's book.
Not finished yet and mainly science but is on the way.
Cases in Ashford.
Apparently there were 3 cases of what seemed to be CJD in men in Ashford (a town in Kent, S. england) reported in 1996. The local Public Health Physician was shocked and has called in the Public Health Lab Service to try to work out if there is anything that conects them. This is an amazing breakthrough in that the PHLS were ordered to keep their thieving fingers away from anything to do with BSE right at the beginning of the epidemic (this was because they actually gave information to the public about things - quite unacceptable! - and had been involved in the media hype of Listeria and Salmonella). The fact that we have suddenly been shocked by what was going on is mainly due to inadequate epidemiology having been carried out up until now. The PHLS must be a necessity in this disease and a lot of people know it. Also the cases in Ashford, if they are a cluster (an accidental chance of 1 in 300 of 3 cases including 2 of the new type CJD2 appearing in the UK in a year) might suggest that the cases were becoming infected early in the BSE epidemic.
10 cases so far of CJD2?
It seems that the number of 10 was picked out of the air to some degree when it was first announced in the Houses of Parliament onthe 20th March. There were actually more than that but some were in the process of dying. A better figure would be 15 at that time and apparently there has been a run on cases ever since then as everyone from psychiatrists to dermatologists have realised what was wrong with some of their cases.
4 farmers? No abattoir workers?
It appears now that in 1995 there was another farmer just Norther of Manchester that developed CJD. He was from a farm with BSE. It was hushed up and keep quiet as all the staff working in the hospital with him were told to. The abattoir worker in York appeared in Jan and died quickly and it now appeares that there may well be another one on the way.
France is OK?
The French government has made grand statements that this new CJD2 may have nothing to do with BSE. They had a case in a man from Lyon and the people in Edinburgh confirmed that it was one of the CJD2 type. The crash in the beef sales in France led to the slaughter of thousands of cattle exported by the UK and the Government trying pseudoscience to calm everyone down. What they did not say is, of course, that UK had been exporteing some of the most infective cattle carcases to France and the French had not introduced an offals ban until (?1994). The French are the biggest consumers of offals in Europe and the number of infected cattle eaten in France can actually be calculated from MAFF's export data. This has been offered to them but no reply has come. The French are now going to be putting more research into CJD than the UK did!
We told them so.
Apparently various documents had gone from the UK to France warning them of the BSE risk early in the epidemic. It seems that they are going to need someone to blame when they did nothing.
Research is stepping up in the UK.
Well it would do. The problem is that the research funding may just be part of the current budget. What happens then is simply the people working on chickens that suddenly could not get a grant have to moving into BSE, a very complex subject indeed. This sort of thing happened with HIV. Huge funds appeared and little got done because the research being carried out by many of the people was valueless.
Narang's magic test.
He actually had the urine test for CJD going to some degree a long time ago. The technique involves the filtration of the urine onto a mineral and the removal of it again into a small volume of fluid. This is then looked at under the electron microscope. There is a lot of cynical viewing of his results but I expect he will get somewhere if given the equipment. The House of Commons Select Committee on Health chairwoman (Mrs Roe) simply said she did not understand all the papers he had given them and it was only Mr. Campbell Savours, a determined man, on the Labour side that made it clear to the MAFF that ignoring potential opportunities such as Narang's test at this time would be quite unacceptable.
Central Veterinary Laboratory in disarray.
Now that Ray Bradley has gone to join the SEAC there appears to be relative disarray. The reason was that RB seemed to be steering the ship in the direction of 'dont worry about it folks' and now, all you have to do is re-look at the results they had got already and it becomes clear that not all is so surely safe. Much of the research money that was supposed to appear in December 1995 just disappeared and the researchers at CVL quickly got very little (nobody is very sure where it went). Wilesmith is still going around telling everyone that there is no vertical transmission or very little at least. He does not seem to be taking into account various possibilities and his group are not all believing him dispite all the hard work.
Vertical Transmission.
A poster of information on vertical transmission of BSE was put up at the Soc Vet Epid and Inf Cont in Glasgow in March. It was a popular poster and showed that things were not all as should be if the disease was just passed in feed.
Web sites
. The possibility has now appeared on the horizon of all the web sites being sort of joined together on BSE.
Dogs and BSE?
The noise that some dogs may have BSE has increased apparently there have been around 30 reports of progressive degenerating nervous conditions leading to death over the past year. It seems to start in older animals as a staggering and falling over. The development of the condition is slow but relentless. One animal has been looked at by Liverpool Vet school and they found nothing in its brain under histology. Watch this space.
Compensation.
The data that had been put out by the USDA concerning the effect of changing the level of compensation and the effect that his has on the numbers of cases of scrapie reported. This is so blatant that it would be impossible for MAFF to pretend that compensation levels changing from 50% to 100% in 1989 for BSE had no effect.
Blood transfusion.
At the Gottingen conferencein 1995 Paul Brown refused to answer a question concerning the risk to humans from blood transfusion if some of them had caught BSE. He said that nobody could catch BSE and so there could be no answer to the question. The article in the BMJ in March 1996 from him was almost an apology. He said he never expected it but now we now we had to assume that BSE had infected humans. Well, Paul, what now about blood transfusion?
Rob Will's speech.
Two weeks before the UK government admitted that it had been in error (March 20, 1996) suggesting that BSE would not affect humans, Rob Will, who must have known all about this at the time, gave a speech to the House of Commons Forum stating the same thing. In fact they had quite a bit of data in 1995 and Ironside must have been pushing it forward then. (Ironside is a bright man and I doubt that he would not have noticed the changes in CJD2 fairly earlyEd)
What are they going to do with all the carcasses?
Apparently it simply has not been worked out what to do with all the potentially infective material. Mince it, put it in the ground? The current best plan is to turn it into meat and bone meal as previously and then incincerate it in Powergen's coal fired power stations. Every seen any dust onyour car? Where does the dust come from? In the UK a lot of it comes from powerstations. There's going to be a lot of arguments on this one.
The dying farmers.
Well, not all that many farmers in the UK only are involved in milking cattle (although this is certainly true in some parts of the country). When investigated it appears that he farmers have done so well over the past few years (partly because of the drop in the value of the pound) that they could easily pay for many of their milking cattle to be slaughtered at the end of their milking lives and not even get any compensation. "they could handle it quite easily" was an opinion I heard at the agricultural meeting.
SEAC did not suggest that older cattle be destroyed?
I find this extremely unlikely as it would be the older cattle that represented the risk to humans. What seems much more likely is that the UK Government took SEAC advice and then decided themselves that there should be no slaughter. This was boiund to be followed by demads from the EU ....and in that case the EU can pay for it cant they! A crafty way to pass the bill the the EU I would guess but it hardly matters now.
SEAC
asked to go back to their meeting and decide if children were more at risk. Well, perhaps they were, but it seems more likely that they had already given a decision on this subject to Steven Dorrell and he asked them to think again.
Why March 20th?
The story goes that SEAC had been given the data (dont forget that Rob Will's band report to the Dept of Health, not SEAC) and decided that this was very serious indeed. When it was put to the Government they did not really want to let it out and wanted more information before making it public. Indeed some members fo the Government (?Heseltine) wanted for it to be suppressed. They say that Pattison, who is 6 feet tall, and a very determined but mild mannered man, made it clear that either they let the information out or he would resign (in which case it would get out of the bag anyway). Very complex and a lot of heresay but it is clear to all involved that Pattison has been a breath of fresh air to the whole process.
Research. Well yes we should go ahead.
One expert on CJD is not Professor Swales (formerly the prof of medicine at Leicester University, but now at Richmond House, in Whitelhall DofH). The statement in the House of commons on 25th of March by Dorrell that Swales was going to be drawing up (over the weekend supposedly but this seems rediculous) a research plan for BSE would be worrying. Yet again they have picked someone outside the subject to produce their report. Let us hope he gets good advice.
The Southwood Committee.
Southwood, from the Zoology Dept in Oxford, now claims that he wanted to put in his report that BSE should be assumed to be infective to humans but this not happen. He, and his mate Dr. Watson (who appeared on Grampian TV in March, telling everyone that their report was acceptable when it stated that humans eating bovine brain was not a risk) surely cannot justify some parts of the report and the fact that some of the major researchers in the field were not asked for their opinion before it was published.
Public health and beef.
Dealler have a talk at the Royal Society of Medicine on the risks to humans from BSE in April. At the end a very nice American stood up and asked the audience (about 60 PH workers including the top dogs) if they still ate beef. Only 3 people raised their hands and Calman, the government's chief medical officer, kept his hand down (but I expect he was abstaining).
On the way (May, 1996).
The TV people are moving in. The Europeans are moving in and it looks as if the budget for research in the field will jump. The data concerning risks from blood transfusion and exported cattle to France will be published soon. The information concerning the risks to humans and how the calculations could be made as to the size of the epidemic will come out in the data given by Dealler to the House of Commons Select committee on Health and Agriculture. The problem with this sort of disease is that there is rarely good news.
Vertually everyone is now admitting that BSE is not scrapie
This is now being admitted by MAFF's veterinary officers unfficially.
Further information suggests that genotype (or perhaps the semen) of certain bulls may transfer the disease
A second report of the offspring of a specific bull seem to go down with BSE. This report comes from the South West.
Lectures are being given in various places where they simply cannot find enough room in the buildings for the audience because it is so large.
The recent talk in Glasgow at the SEC (16.5.95) and in Aberdeen Forresterhill on the same day, were packed out.
There now seems to be evidence that there are a few more cases of CJD in abattoir workers.
More data may come out on this in a few weeks time.
It now seems that there may be more the the OP story.
Other farmers have been found to feel that there is some external factor that is involved and the infective agent may not be the whole story.
It now (May 1996) may appear that BSE may cause CJD and the CJD unit in Edinburgh is backing up this idea against argument
. They are now quite determined (and probably rightly so - Ed). At the meeting in Glasgow Martin Zeidler, who had worked on the epidemiology had made it certain in is own mind that the new cases really were new and that there had not been many before this date. They had to assume it was due to BSE. Gareth Roberts was, however putting forward the position that there was more CJD around than we thought and, because of this we must look out for the possibility that the new cases really had been there before.
The Ashford cases.
It now seems that the PHLS are going to be involved in some of the work on the cases seen. The CJD Unit are not happy that there is any connection between them but that does not seem to stop the flurry.
A dog in Lancashire and one Staffordshire have gone down with BSE-like symptoms.
I am not sure whether they are actually going to get post-mortems.
The new regulations for cattle over 30 months being slaughtered and incinerated at the end of their working lives means that farmers will be compensated for them..
I have now heard that farmers are not reporting cases of BSE because of this. After all, if they will get some compensation anyway, why go through the difficulty of claiming a case of BSE? I am now told by farmers in Yorkshire that many cases of BSE have been slaughtered in this way rather than reported to MAFF. This will have a big effect on the BSE figures.
The reason why cattle that go down with BSE tend to be born in September and October is not clear (it is certainly not due to that being the calving time of the year)..
Suggestions have been put forwards that this is due to heifers being made pregnant for the first time so as to calve then and specific bulls being used. Another reason put forward is that at that time of the year, when the animals are born, the grass is covered with spiders webs (? how this will cause the diseaseEd). June 1996
It now appears that there may well be more new cases appearing in young people in France.
It is certainly not clear yet but there has been some gossip coming out of young people with the new CJD2 symptoms.
Major may have completely failed in trying to get the Europeans to back down.
I have now spoken to a number of people in Europe that see his stance as having been completely useless and made a lot of enemies.
The French have now made the reporting of cases of Scrapie a legal act and if farmers do not do it they will be fined heavily.
One of the things that did not seem to come out in the news was that the selective culls suggested by MAFF to the Europeans in order to get rid of BSE would only really prevent about 35% of the cases that would otherwise have appeared.
It is not surprising that they were not impressed.
Farmers are now saying that they will not continue to report cases of BSE in the UK!
This is really an unofficial statement in that it is not the NFU but individual farmers that have been saying this. The reason is simply that they can get some compensation for the death of a cow by taking it to the incinerator if it is over 30 months while it can still stand. Why bother milking the cow for a month and throwing the milk away when you may not get any compensation at all (if the vet wont accept the case) and why get a case of BSE and not be able to sell you cattle in the future as a result? The farmers simply thought it would not be worth it and that MAFF's statistics on the incidence of BSE should no longer be believed (i.e. they thought that the other farmers were thinking the same way).
The electricity company Powergen has already got onto the incineration of meat and bone meal from the cattle over 30 months.
They are actually being paid to do it. What has not been let out is that they were given data on the potential risk that they would be putting their staff to..and it was not zero (indeed MAFF did not pretend it was). ....Mean time MBM was piling up on a military base in Gloucestershire afterbeing dumped there by open topped lorries. The men dealing with it were wearing paper masks and it was blowing all over to the local houses.
This is not to say that National Power are out of this.
They are also interested in the process but the amount of electricity produced will not be the advantage. No doubt the government will have to give them some money.
The new ideas that are appearing as to the causes of CJD/scrapie/BSE have put the scientific world (if it is awake) to storm.
Stuart Neilson's genetics stories have a strong ring of truth and his work at Brunel may well come up with a lot of answers.
It now looks as if the evidence concerning vertical transmission of BSE from cow to calf is being given to SEAC.
Dealler has produced a 50 page dossier of the information and explanations, which are difficult to understand at first hand and may well have great difficulty getting through to the those that are still stuck on the 'nugget' of infection theory of MAFF.
Newsnight on the BBC on 20th June had Stephen Dorrell, John Patisson, and some compettive groups.
After the show they were given a few glasses of wine (Dealler having shaken Dorrell's hand and offered him a copy of his book, 'Lethal Legacy' before the politician left). At this one of the farmers spent a good 10 minutes explaining how he was quite certain that there was more to it than just the feed and that he was quite unhappy with the handling of the subject by MAFF. It was interesting that he was quite certain that large numbers of cases of BSE had been taken to the abattoir. "it was just the done thing". Frances Hall was furious at Dorrell and how he had not stopped the risks to other people from BSE.
At last it seems that the Public Health Laboratory Service may be becoming involved with BSE.
The reason why it has been kept out of the subject is simply not clear througout the epidemic. The small cluster of cases in Ashford may well bring them in this time.
The EMPs in Strasbourg have called a number of the relatives of the people that have died of BSE to see them.
Apparently there is going to be a meeting of some kind there in the last week of the month. The MPs, who are of course associated with the Labour EMP for Scotland that is head of the Public Health Committee are not at all happy with the way that the UK government has handled this. They are all 'praying that Major does not last much longer.'
It now seems that MAFF have offered Narang some cattle urines to do some of his amazing test on (looking to see if they are infected).
"Well, what about some controls?" he asked but was asked why he wanted them. They said that they could not find any cattle urine in the UK that they could guarantee did not contain BSE. They did not even seem to have good figures on how many of the cattle in a field were likely to be infected. Narang demanded that they get urines from abroad to act as the negatives for his test.
British beef sales in the UK have not fully recovered.
It does not seem to have met people's eye but the level of beef sales is still quite low. People in the meatpie, sausage etc companies have changed the meats that they are using to make the produce, basically because the demand for UK beef is still low (despite the idea being put around that you should now eat UK beef for queen and country, as well as to show these Europeans that we dont care what they think).
A group of French neuropathologists have now said that they are unhappy that BSE has caused the new CJD2.
The reasons are that the appearance down the microscope that they see have been seen for many years.
Lacey now claims that there have been 23 cases of the CJD-2 disease.
Lacey usually has the information that others do not have if only because various consultants ring him up.
The article in the BMJ that says that half the neurologists in the UK did not know to report cases of CJD to the CJD Unit in Edinburgh.
This seems really worrying in the Rob Will has been happy that his results have been quite good. The difference that this will make is not clear at this time, however.
The Medical Research Council seems to have an unknown amount of money at its fingertips concerning BSE and the CJD that it seems to have caused.
The group at the Department of Health have produced a list of research that needs to be done (although this is not let out to mortals) have not released any figures on the quantity of money that will be made available.
It seems that one of the relatives of a man that is dying of CJD is going to be sueing the MAFF.
He was apparently hired by them to slaughter cattle and was not warned of any risks that he might be taking.
The experiment that has been organised by the MAFF to see if pigs develop BSE after being fed the disease has been rather different from the experiment used in other animals.
What they have done is feed the pigs with a similar amount of infection that they think would be in the pig feed 'normally'. They do not seem to realise that they dont know how much infection is in the meal and they cannot carry experiments out on only a few pigs in such a manner in order to proclaim that all the millions of pigs that might eat the meal would be OK. You have to show that the pigs are not at risk after eating maybe 100 or 1000 times that amount as guesstimated to be in the meal on average. The experiment will be open to severe criticism.
Gelatine manufacturers may not be telling the whole truth.
Originally the idea was that gelatin was manufactured from the bones of larger animals and then it was purified, dried and powdered. The temperatures for this in the text books are not really paticularly high. When the World in Action Team asked them, the manufacturers told them of temperatures over 200 degees that would be used. Apparently Lacey has had a try at using the methods that they say they are using and cannot reach the pressures needed for the temperatures and even when high temperatures are used, the gelatine is destroyed by the heat....so what is happening? It may well be that they meant Farenheit and not Centigrade...but if they did then the geletine will not be safe.
I have been contacted by the wife of a person working for the new Meat Hygeine Service and it seems that he has been threatened for turning down too many carcasses.
Before starting withe the MHS he was working for a group with good standards and expected the same of the MHS. Apparently their standards are not as high.
Reports are coming in of some farmers having far too many cattle aged 30 months released back to them allegedly for their own consumption.
apparently they simply could not possibly be eating them.
The spinal of the carcass is still being used for the manufacture of mechanically recovered meat.
This was a shock to me in that I had locked it in my head that the spine had been banned from human consumption. He (from the MHS) told me that all they were soing was to remove the meninges from the spinal canal and after that the rest could go to the machines.

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