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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Go to the gossip before July 1996, often still significant
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Go to the gossip after February 1998
Dont forget to go to the news gossip sections

July 1996

There is now the CJD help line on 01380 720033.
It is being organised by Dot Churchill and will hopefully be getting funding from the Government along with books to send out to people who are worried. This is a very good idea.
The Royal Statistical Society is irritated that quite inadequate amounts of statistics have taken place concerning BSE.
Apparently numerous attempts have been taken to try to get the MAFF to look at its own data with a statistical eye; but without success, at least publicly anyway.
The French are getting hyped. It looks as if they are eating low amounts of beef and that they are not picking up.
The French farmers are not liking this and almost marching on Paris. Quite a shock and I am told that they will need someone else to blame...I wonder who!
Cattle being given BSE syndromes for compensaton.
It is now said that some farmers actually put bags over the head of a cow to prevent breathing in order to cause the animal to lose its brain capacity and appear to have BSE. This was reported to me from Northern Ireland
The vertical transmission rate as a proportion of the number of BSE cases may well be rising rapidlly.
Professor Anderson from Oxford said that it may be reaching 8% and that this was being investigated further. More information concerned with VT is being investigated.
The urine test for BSE may be one the way.
It will not be the one from Narang, however as a group from France, who say they have found a test using urine electrophoresis for dementing illnesses. Of course cattle do not get alzheimer's disease so it will be only BSE in them...if it works.
Statisticians are moving in.
After the meeting in York it seems that other researchers involved in statistics may seem to have new ideas on the methods of transmission. Watch this space.
The Meat Hygeine Service are being told of problems...and are slow to respond.
The MHS are getting on with the job (after all they have had a lot of money to do it with) but it seems that they may not be aware that various things are still going on. For instance the use of various parts of the spine for the production of mechanically recovered meat. There are sill problems with the MHS and what it can do if things are not done that they say. Can they act without the law. This is currently under review but rather a lot of gentlemanly demands are being made.
Public Health should be top of the BSE priority.
Well of course. And it now seems to have got through that it was not even asked for its opinion for a long time. At the York meeting Professor Pattison was asked about this and simply siad that things had changed. After this meeting there almost seemed to be a breath of fresh air in the subject. Pattison seems to have managed to get the warring groups together. Good luck to him.
The glycoside problem is coming back.
Prusiner seems to have ruled out the idea that the type of glycoside that is present on the prion protein is of no significance. It now seems that the group in Montana are showing the opposite...and if that is true then we will find that the glycosidase inhibitor drugs may well be important as a treatment (at least as a start).
Books sold out.
Dealler's book on 'Lethal Legacy' has vertually sold out and certainly did at the York meeting.
The expert of BSE at the Mail on Sunday is looking for some more data
...perhaps more articles are on the way. After his devastating ones in 1995 and earlier this year we may have some more.
New sites for the storage of meat and bone meal before incineration
. Alaxander dock site at Merseyside, Curry Morrison in Belfast docks, Humberside docks, RAF Quedgeley, and Greendale Barton (at Woodbury, Salterton) appear to be the first few that have been released.. The inspectors are being told that it is not 'waste' until it has been rendered from the infected cattle and they are wondering why not. Surely it is potentially a risk before rendering more than after rendering. A further report is gong to be coming from the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens 'soon' and this may stop this anomaly as in the previous ACDP report on TSEs at work the advice applied to everyone (apparently) except abattoirs, which were supposed to have their own regulations (although I could find none of significance).
It seems that blood is still being used as non-infective material from cattle slaughtered.
Its use in fertiliser has not changed. MAFF say that there is no infection in it, although it is not clear how they know this as no adequate experiments have been carried out.
The level of infectivity in meat and bone meal after incineration is to be measured by looking for nitrogen in it.
However the method recommended is around 10 to 100 times too insensitive to pick up the levels of nitrogen that they need to look for (according to MAFF and SEAC).
Of course the dyes that are sprayed on SBO do of course get broken down by rendering.
And, of course it is then impossible to look at the rendered product and say which is from SBO and which is not. Apparently MAFF are looking into it with mass spectrometry (or at least that is how they should be doing it) but to the man that is checking things that will not be so easy.
Health and Safety are quoted as saying that waste products handled as currently are adequately safe.
They do not seem to realise the ACDP report may not agree with this and a definitive statement from HSE is still awaited by the waste groups.
It seems that the Environmental Agency 01743 253593 are now managing to point out various factors that MAFF did not think of.
e.g. SBM particles passing into drainage systems. Also, they have managed to find out that wastes passed from abattoir to renderer are wates but not 'controlled' wastes (and hence they are not a risk?). It is n ot at all clear how this seems to have been decided and the EA seems to have its finger on button.
Apparently SEAC has advised the Government that BSE does not pose a risk to the environment.
It is not completely clear how they have decided this and the data is yet to be shown.

August 1996

Maff now putting up signs to stop animals being fed at the zoo.
If you go to Camelot the fairground in the North for kids, you find signs telling you not to feed any of theanimals with things that contain meat (because of BSE)...and it is from MAFF!!!
DofH releases figures of CJD.
up to 1994, and none of them include latest figures concerning the variant form.
European groups are now telling me that they expect the ban on UK beef to be indefinite.
This seems a bit hard but it shows more the anger that they feel towards MAFF and the EC for not telling them what was going on earlier.
The meeting in Sicily.
For some reason various people were not even told about the meeting. It seems that Collinge is closely involved in the meeting and exactly why only limited groups were informed is unclear.
On the 19th of July SEAC were told by Wilesmith and Anderson that BSE was vertically transmitted.
What does not seem to have gone through is that SEAC spent 2 hrs before them arriving being told that VT fitted very well the pattern of disease that was seen and it was necessary that various simple pieces of research take place in order to look for it i.e. the cohort study results were not actually necessary...and then Wilesmith came in.
It looks as if people at CVL are being sacked who have been working on BSE.
Exactly the reason seems unclear but probably, as usual this is due to money. The severe argument that has gone on politically concerning MAFF doing the research itself and then producing the results that it would like to see is probably the result as much of the work is being put out to academics outside. It is however a pity as there have been some quite excellent researchers there suddenly seeing the end of their job.
Still there is no idea as to the size of the funding that is going to go into the disease research.
Various researchers are looking worried that there is not enough to get the research done that is necessary.
Milk infected.
The newspapers are absolutely determined to make a story out of it but it seems that even Lacey drinks UK milk.
Vertical transmission may be worse than we are told.
What did not come out from the SEAC document is that although 19 cattle from the 273 that had come from asymptomatic mothers developed disease, this may not have been because their mothers were not infected (and hence the disease much have appeared from feed or environment). In fact all 43 from the cohort group may well have been from infected mothers and not exposed to external infection, in which case the VT rate would be 15.7%....unfortunately this happens to be the rate expected to be seen if all the cases of BSE were infected from their mother. More research is needed but it is clear that the 10% figure given is the lowest figure possible.
Vertical transmission is seen as disastrous.
Behind the scenes the MAFF are absolutely struck by the thought that they may not be able to export any cattle for a very long time. Certainly this 'all well in November' idea is completely finished. Even though officially they are putting over the idea that all the cattle will be free of disease by 2005 this is worked out by really bending over backwards with the statistics and crossing fingers.
Various European groups now seem to be unwilling to import UK beef.
I have been contacted by the group form Austria and Germany and this is not surprising considering what is happening here.
Sheep in France.
The banning of the brain and spinal cord of sheep from human food in France has sent a chill up my spine. When the mathematics is carried out it seems that by the time it was found that there was an epidemic of BSE in the UK, it was already too late to carry out a major slaughter policy to remove the disease (vertually the whole of the national herd would have had to be slaughtered). Dormont seems determined to go ahead with his ban but the cost versus the amount gained would be show it to be simply valueless....unless there was imply more BSE in France than appears in the statistics.
It may be that we have a treatment for BSE.
The treatment for Alzheimer's disease, galanthamine that has just put the Shires shares up to 27 million. It seems that they have been approached to look for TSE treatments with it. So far no luck apparently. Unless the Government actually says that there is a risk to humans from BSE and that this is likely to make a drug company some money then the businesses do not seem to want to put their drugs to the test.
The tartrazine dyes are thought to be unhelpful.
Meat and non-SBM from cattle over 30 months are being sprayed with a tartrazine dye (yellow) to make sure that it does not get into the human food chain. It seems that there has been little effect from the dye as it is simply making the meat look like older meat.
A way of purifying run off water from abattoirs?
It may be that a monoclonal against PrP may be useful for the purifying of water by attatching the immunoglobulin to an exchange collumn and passing the water through. The company involved is keeping its head down at the moment and is getting ready to pounce. (unfortunately there is currently no adequate way to test the purity of water and hence the usefulness of such a collumn - Ed)
The group in Kent are getting ready for a battle about the rendering plant.
This was the plant that simply spread the effluent from the plant over the fields and allowed it to soak in rather than putting it in the mains drainage. The groups seems to have EMPs involved and they are having a meeting in Canturbury on 19th of September.
Abattoirs are still only carrying out the regulations under duress.
It seems from a number of sources as if they still do not realise that there is a potential risk to the population and the farming industry from their actions. One plant did things OK but could not see what good it did and another carried out the directions but poorly and the person that was watching from the Environmental Agency got the impression that if someone was not actually watching it may not have been done.
Farmers thought to be fiddling the ear tags on cattle.
The fact that cattle slaughtered over 30 months are worth a lot less may mean that some of the tags from older cattle have been swapped with others, making them more valuable. Inspectors are determined that this is going on but dont have proof.
Blood transfusion: a risk?
Apparently Leeds Radio found out about the article coming out in Transfusion Medicine by ringing up Dr. Dealler and asking him about something else and he presumed that it was a question about the article! It was put out the following morning as a major scoop.
Diagnosis for the disease...it seems that MAFF are basically runnign out of ideas
on how to diagnose the disease before symptoms appear. This would be vertually the only way of getting rid of BSE long before it would die out (hopefully) anyway. It looks as if MAFF will put things out to independent groups. This is after 6 years of effectively failure but hard work.
Narang denies that he has heard from MAFF or DofH offering to carry out his urine test
. It seems that they have not done this and it is not clear what has gone on in that SEAC seem to think that there cannot be a problem with this.
Methods of diagnosis on the way???
Various other groups now are looking into the problem and may well get funded. The group in Aberystwyth and at CVL seem to think there are some specific methods. MRC have received quite a lot of applications for money to do this but of course some of the people asking for the cash hardly have a lab in which to work as they have not been 'in' people for some time.
Blood transfusion problems with BSE.
This has been on the desk for some time with SEAC and they have been in contact with the National Blood Authority about reasonable positions to take. It is not clear, however, that the DofH are catching up with the problem and their statements on the subject are derived from before March 1996 i.e. they state that there is felt to be no risk to humans from BSE. A member of SEAC actually had a copy of Dealler's article stating that a risk was being taken in 1994.
Mike Richardson seems to be moved out of BSE at CVL or early retirement.
Major researcher in BSE epidemiology. Why?
New information going to SEAC concerning environmental factors of BSE.
It now seems that SEAC are receiving information concerning the environmental factors that might have either caused the disease or permitted it to pass from cow to cow. Pattison is clearly not just taking MAFF's views as the ultimate science.
Anderson's group are fully funded by theWellcome trust (lucky lot) but they have to put up with MAFF's statistics on what is happening with BSE in the farmyard.
This has been a hard time.
New signs are appearing that there is a decent dose/incubation period relationship between cattle and BSE that is fed to them.
So why have we seen vertually no drop in the incubation period until after the feed ban and then it did appear to fall?? Could this be due to underreporting?
The EU will not like what they see in Nature.
The Nature article on 30th August is basically agreeing with all the data put out earlier by independent groups...but this time MAFF is having to agree with it. What it also means is that MAFF has to admit that it was previously misleading the population in the UK and the EU (and doing it apparently deliberately).

September 1996

The Oxford group with Anderson may have opened a can of worms.
One of the pieces of research that they made open was the data showing that cattle fed larger amounts of infection died after a shorter incubation period (mind you they were being fed a very large amount). One of the most important factors, however is that the animals fed the same amount 3 times died quicker than the cattle fed the same amount once. MAFF (and SEAC) has spent some time denying cumulative infection despite it being the accepted viewpoint.
Groups are not happy about the safety of surgical instruments.
It now seems that if humans are infected with BSE, and it is a younger group that has done so, then maybe the surgical instruments used for their appendicitis may actually be infected and the ordinary autoclaving will not get rid of the infection.
Various groups around the world have become interested in the safety of UK blood for transfusion.
No further data yet.
It looks as if the UK Government has backed down on halving the payment to abattoirs to take cattle for compensation payments.
Originally it looked as if it was going to be a payment of 80 per animal but in Northern Irland this was cut to 40 when MAFF thought they were making a profit on it all. The abattoirs simply refused to take the cattle. It looks as if that was going to happen all over the UK but MAFF seems to have backed down.
Legras (top civil servant in Agricultural Commission in Brussels) had received information about the risks involved in BSE well before March 1996.
It now seems that he had been told that there was a risk to humans that should have been considered under public health long before the information was indeed considered. It seems that I was not the only one that sent him data suggesting that public health was at stake and should at least be considered.
Test for CJD in humans is on its way.
Initial publication of the results from California (which dont apply to the new CJD2) are being published at the moment.
French public health groups realise that BSE may not be easy to deal with.
The reason being that the processes used in the rendering industry are so basic that potentially infected bovine offals may be simply left in the open and water, soil, etc may well be allowed to become contaminated. There seems to be little information available with which to be sure of safety. A french group contacted me recently saying that things are very difficult to handle.
Further action is taking place through the European Parliament in Strasbourg concerned with BSE.
Not clear exactly what is taking place but it seems that various researchers are being called to give information to an Enviromental committee and this would direct action to be taken concerned with the subject.
Various researchers unhappy with the predictions of Nature article.
It is not exactly clear why but it now seems that European researchers are looking at the paper from Anderson's group in Oxford with cynical eyes. It may not be accepted by the statistics groups abroad.
Stan Prusiner states that 13 patients have died with the new strain of CJD in UK at the ICAAC conferece in New Orleans.
He may have meant that the figure included the one in France but that is not certain. Maybe he just has inside news. This was when he was receiving a prize and giving a lecture for his work on prions.
Goat offspring go down with BSE.
It seems that all the kids of the goats that were given BSE have also developed the disease. I hear that this has been in 10 animals. No further data but it suggests that MAFF should not have been surprised at VT in cattle.
Insider groups are not at all surprised at the response from the EU about the UK stopping the beef cull of 147,000.
Many people felt that there was never likely to be any dropping of the ban on UK beef at all until the UK could actually be shown to be BSE free. One of the problems was that there was always new bad news appearing about BSE and if the EU was taking UK beef at that time then again their own farmers would suffer as beef sales fell again. i.e. the Europeans do not want the same beef crashes as seen in the UK.
The UK Government are now determined that BSE will disappear by 2001.
Anderson's Oxford group suggested that in their Nature article. However, your statistics cannot be any better than your data, which was derived from MAFF and had various flaws, which the Oxford group will admit. It seems that the powers in office, however are grabbing it as the last chance of a feel good factor with BSE.
There may well be more to the potential tests for BSE.
A patent has been put in suggesting at specific method for testing cattle and it is expected to cost around 15.
The Medical Research Council
has now received large numbers of applications for funding and was expecting them to 'go to the next level' of decisions in which some are simply thrown away as being valueless and the others go to even more important people for determination as to who gets the cash. The problems have always been in that the subjects involved are often only looked into by a small number of people and so they must be both the jury and the recipients of money. In BSE/CJD this will be even more difficult as there are 'friends and foes' of Government. The gossip says that some people have been told that they 'will almost certainly' get their money already. What happened was that MAFF's lab at Weybridge, the BBSRC lab in Edinburgh, the CJD unit, and few other places did any work and so they are likely to be the recipients. However the reason that they were used was that they could be kept quiet and so the problem continues; still academic yes-men dividing the cake and the population only hearing about what happens long afterwards.
It is still unclear as to how much money is being put into BSE research.
With MAFF vertually pulling out it all seems that the disease is being put into the hands of the academics, who have not really much experience of it. 4.6 million? Unlimited research money? Nobody has put a figure on the table that appears valid.
The Swiss have been advised by their own SEAC to cull 230,000 cattle.
But that will need to get past their own Government.
At the moment Jeff Almond and Roy Anderson (both academics in BSE) are on a trip to Australia to give talks about BSE.
It is now claimed that there are more cases of BSE in France than they wish to admit.
A group of vets are keeping information about the cases and say that there are more. Mark Purdey is going over to France to see them.
The backlog for the slaughter of cattle over 30 months is 40 weeks.
This means that the farmers are going to have to feed the cattle over the winter and it will cost money.
Farmers now admit that the advantages for reporting cases of BSE are now not there.
The compensation for the slaughter of a cow over 30 months is about the same as it would be for a BSE case as those would be the price that it would be when old. Farmers are afraid that if they report cases then their farms may not be able to sell cattle if the rules are changed. BUT if a cow develops symptoms just now, with the backlog so long then the farmer may just have to admit to having a case.
It seems that the Swiss Government are accepting their SEAC advice and are going to slaughter 230,000 cattle.
The organophosphate story is coming to life again.
It now seems that the Neurological researchers in London are carrying out the research to see if thalamide (that is associated with thalidomide) is involved in the production of prions in vitro.
The NIH groups are now suggesting that meat and bone meal is not used for bovine feed in the USA.
This now seems very likely to go ahead.
It now seems that the Chief Veterinary Officer, David Meldrum, is being replaced?
An advertisement has appeared for his post.
There has been a report of farmers claiming to have seen similar clinical conditions as BSE starting in the late 1970s in the UK.
This would make a lot of sense with the changes of the manufacturing processes that took place early in the 1970s.
The Norwegians seem to have been some kind of 'outbreak' of scrapie.
This must all seem very odd for what is partly genetic and does not seem to be passed from one sheep to another in the same pen. They immediately had a wide slaughter of all the sheep around places where cases occurred with full compensation. Some cases came back and more appeared elsewhere. The question must have arisen as to whether the UK had exported BSE infected meal to them.
Professor Owen at Bangor University
made it clear that he was not happy with the results of the Oxford group as being a certain future but he had to follow a long trail to get any data out of MAFF with which to show this by calculation.
Dioxins in the brain?
Various farms in Cheshire and Derbyshire seems to have been closed down because of the presence of dioxins in the milk. One group feels that the dioxins may actually be related to BSE simply through bringing the toxicity forward, although the actual reason has not been fully explained. ICI are apparently going to be looking into this although this is yet to be confirmed.
Lancet editorial of 28th Sept.
This was thoroughly damning of the Government's inadequate research into BSE and its potential risks. It seems that the editor did not want the newspapers to know about it in advance and it simply wasn't released to them. It seems that there is now a growing body of opinion in the scientific community that the handling of BSE has been bad.
Meeting about BSE in Aberystwyth
Farmers and academics got together to discuss what they were actually going to do in Wales about the various plans that had been put out by MAFF. Many farmers were simply saying that they weren't having their cattle slaughtered and that they would find a way to get them into market. Also it seems that some farmers were still just saying that the Meat and Livestock Commission must simply sell beef harder and all will be well.
MRC failure in grants for BSE research.
It now appears that from national advertising they only got 99 application for funding for research into BSE. Of those, 9 were from me! Only 52 got short listed and it is expected that it will be a further 6-8 months before anyone actually gets told they will be funded. Also, a number of major directions for research were not even applied for. Dont they realise that most of the people that might have been involved in BSE research kept out of it because of the politics of the last 8 years? Dont they realise that they will have to do more than just ask for applications? Dont they realise that many of the people that might have been involved were kept out because they might let the data out to the public? Dont they realise that things will not be like fasionable research? This is disastrous.
Neuropathogenesis Unit is having its core research fund cut.
For some reason the core funding, which pays for the basic scientist salaries is being cut so that administration and many other aspects is being decreased to dangerous levels. Researchers are finding themselves spending most of their time wasted on applications to groups that will not know whether they are adequate or not. The MRC Unit kept quite right the way through the BSE epidemic about the risk that was being taken with human lives. They have kept quiet about the BSE epidemic being likely to go on for much longer than recently predicted. What may well happen is that more information reaches the press that MAFF do not like.

October 1996

Dr. Knight has been taken on at the CJD Unit in Edinburgh.
He used to work in Aberdeen and wrote a piece about CJD for the Br J Hosp Med.
It is becoming even more unclear what the BSE research money is being spent on.
With the Edinburgh group having to fight for funding when they are the major researchers in the country, it is even more strange. Claims have been made that over 100m have either been spent or been promised but this unclear. It has been suggested that the same money that was previously spent on other staff are now having their costs channelled through the BSE costs and disappearing. i.e. secretaries, managers, etc of groups at CVL...when really they were hired under a totally different arrangement. In other words what is felt by other groups is that the Government is getting a poor deal for its money. 100m will pay 3,000 salaries for a project 3 years and there appears to be much lower numbers hired.
The USA is now becoming more worried about the use of UK blood products.
Watch this space.
The outbreak of scrapie in Norway.
This actually has the same pattern as would be expected for a disease derived from BSE infected bone meal early in the epidemic. What it also shows is the slow initial rise followed by an explosion of numbers at has been would be expected for CJD in humans.
The EP Committee on BSE.
Professor Lacey spoke, and was extremely effective. Whereas Packer from Maff gave an unimpressive show and Chriss Bostock tried his best but they did not take much notice at the poor research that had taken place.
Other parts of Whitehall dislike MAFF silence
It seems that the Nature editorial had quite some effect. Nature made it very plain that hte researchers outside the MAFF were not happy about the hiding of information and the prevention of data being released. One of the major statisticians rang him up and told him how to go about getting around MAFF's sculduggery by using the Government's 'Open Government' routine. Well, she did not realise it but MAFF is permitted not to give out data for various reasons and some of them are so wide ranging that basically MAFF need not tell anyone things it simply does not want to. For instance it need not give out data that may be commercially bad for one company and good for another. BSE? Any way, MAFF has obviously told its underlings to give out more data....so we will see.
Lord Plum, once the chairman of the National Farmers Union represents the Tories in the European Parliament BSE meeting.
This sounds fairly harmless but he was on the committee investigating BSE for the EP last week. No doubt Lacey will have put him down severely but it is expected that the report will involve his opinions.
It now seems that there is a European Parliament group expecting to take the UK government to court over their handling of the BSE crisis.
The leader of the EP group seems to be the Spanish group that are very annoyed at the handling of this by the UK.
An American group is publishing a book on the mishandling of BSE information.
Ratzan in Boston has organised the book and the titles of the chapters do seem a little strange but aimed at putting forward the idea that information about health should be communicated rather than witheld.
It seems that East Kent Health Authority is determined to give the impression that there is no risk from the rendering plant
that puts its waste out directly onto the soil. Various local newspaper reports and letters indicate that the HA exec simply has repeated the rather hopeful calculations done by MAFF showing that the waste was so diluted as to not matter as a risk. This is not really the way that risk is calculated for TSEs and both MAFF and the Environmental Agency people should have known it. Nobody has heard recently from the CCDC, who originally was really very worried by the whole affair and now is silent. External groups are worried that he has been kept quiet in the same way as the N. Yorkshire group tried to prevent Patterson from publishing the data on BSE.
The Weissman report seems to say that research should start again on BSE.
The recommendations into the research that should take place into BSE was put out in a press release with Franz Fischler. It says that the obvious questions were not asked or chased and basic research should be backed. The most depressing thing is that it gives the impression that much of the most blatant research has not been attempted by the groups in the UK, which is largely true, this being because of underfunding and funding of only groups that kept the Government line.
The political 'go and boil their heads' of Mr Major.
When it was demanded that the EP should see Mr. Hogg and take information directly from the MAFF, I am told that Mr. Major said that the EP could 'go and boil their heads'. This was probably something to do with the Tory Party conference in Bournemouth which was taking place around the same time and the pressures being put on Major to keep the UK independent of the EU.
John Wilesmith seems to have been out of contact.
Nobody is really sure why but John Wilesmith has not been at work for quite some time, or at least has not responded to telephone calls or faxes. The next thing that turned up was that he took his name from being an author on a paper being published in Nature (we are not sure which one). The rumour going around is that he may be going to be removed from his post in the same way as Mike Richards. .....4.11.96...it now seems that Wilesmith is back at his post and the worries about his job may have been unfounded.
Nature had been not acting on a previous paper on BSE for some time before Anderson's paper was published.
It seems that Nature had been submitted a much more aggressive article on BSE, which did not come out with happy news and that this had been pushed around the desks in Nature before Anderson's appeared (and was published very quickly). It seems that Anderson's 'dont worry folks,. its all going away' was grabbed by the UK government as an excuse not to carry out a cull. However the other paper was not quite so good news and would not have permitted the cull to be abandoned.
It seems that Powergen is unhappy that the incinerated material left after the burning of rendered meal may not be completely free of the proteins that they thought would disappear.
Watch this space for news.
The MAFF are now looking in the fields in the UK for mites that may carry prions.
The amazing results from Staten Island showing that the mites from the land in Iceland actually had enough prion chemical to be found using blotting, must mean that the agent might be kept in the land by these arachnids. The worry is, of course that the land might also keep BSE.
Every time people see John Collinge he looks more unhappy about the future of CJD in the UK.
What does he know that we do not? Behind the scenes the groups from the UK at the Vienna meeting were saying that they thought the epidemic of CJD in the UK to be big and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of cases. Worrying.
MRC have turned down one of the major projects
The finding by Collinge's group that the strains of disease may actually be due to glycosylation variation may well be good news. What does not seem to have been realised is that the Medical Research Council actually turned down 4 research projects looking for methods of diagnosis and treatment that might work if this was true. As far as I know no other research projects took this into account.
Weissman's report will be out soon but exactly how to get one is not clear.
The initial release was simply a short affair that said that we would have to do an awfully large amount of research and not sit and wait. It seems as if the main report is quite a lot longer and again says that current research is inadequate. Apparently it should be possible to get a copy from John Collinge's office.
Canadian woman dies of CJD -seems to be the new variant form.
Little information is now available about this but it seems that she was around 63 yrs old i.e. not of the young group of CJD-2 cases that we have seen so far. The worry is that she is also not Met-Met at PrP 129, that being an indication that we are all open to infection but in people with the wrong codon it just takes longer to appear. She was living in the UK until around 1994 and was not a vegetarian.

November 1996

Inveresk Institute gave the information to the gelatin manufactures saying that it was not a risk
. Nobody is really sure who this group are. Anyway, later they produced a second report, which was sent to the EC with nothing explaining it. The second report said that they could not show gelatin not to be a risk as the experiments had not been adequately carried out. It was likely to be this that make EC withdraw ideas that UK gelatin was safe.
Graham Chambers
the man involved with the institue de recherche at the EC. Exactly his position is not clear but he seems to be largely in charge of the funding and demands for funding for research into BSE.
Spanish raporteur overview for the European Parliament.
.... suggests that the UK will be taken to the European Court. The aim being to make the UK pay for all the loss of beef sales in the EC due to the BSE crisis. Initially this seemed hardly possible but it now seems that they are quite determined that it will go ahead.
The commissioners that spoke to the EP committee on BSE have put over the position about the workers in EC.
"Why did you not make a report? Why did you not send out groups to the UK to make sure the MAFF were carrying out all the things they said they would? etc" It came over that they did not really understand the disease and also did not understand well how the actions that MAFF should have done would be essential.
The report to the French newspapers (Liberation) saying that the UK should not report anything about BSE as this would put off beef sales
....this was done by someone that was 'ill' and was unhappy about his post in the EC.
Lacey is being asked all over the country to explain what is going on with BSE.
It now seems that, as Lacey is undoubtedly a very good speaker and produced an exciting explanation of the errors that have taken place, he is giving lectures to this extent in major centres in the UK.
John Collinge is undoubtedly overrun with phone calls.
But he does not seem to be responding. The exact reason could be that he is flying around the world or giving talks. Anyway his contacts are getting restless.
Information is now appearing that scrapie had been passed to other animals by the USDA.
The data does not seem to have been published and some of it is really quite important. Exactly which animals I am not allowed to say but this may be revealed in USDA documents.
It now seems that a Blackpool abattoir owner is being charged.
It is an offence not to remove specific bovine offals (and now other materials) from a cow's carcass before allowing it to be eaten. The Blackpool owner seems to have admitted that the offals were not removed and further data may appear as to whether they went into human food.
The Labour party in the UK is gradually realising that BSE may be an election winning subject.
They are seeking information concerning blood transfusion, lack of research, risk analysis and will be able to stand up to the Government and ask some very severe questions. Presumably the idea is to make sure that the budget will be overspent when they arrive rather than they have to overspend it themselves. Lacey seems to be supplying them with questions.
SEAC are going to talk next week about the safety of incineration of bovine material.
Watch this space, there should be something made official in the next fortnight or so.
Belgian TV documentary on BSE is very serious.
The most severe fragment of the article was the interview of Adriano Aguzzi, who was not at al happy that all would be well and quoted 10,000 and 100,000 and reasonable figures for the number of cases of BSE in humans.
Nature covers the supply of information concerned with BSE..
..and then the supplier admits that he had given it out. This seems to be going on regularly. One of the major things is that the CVL in general seem to be willing to hand out data to the press under the table. Also the Department of Trade and Industry seems to be loose with its thoughts. Only the Dept of Health seems to be rock solid.
The showing of the major documentaries on BSE at the Federation of International Grand Reportage.
i.e. the documentary maker's festval. This showed such serious errors having been made by MAFF and the UK Government that it was almost impossible to ignore them. After the showing the members of the DofH, MAFF, the French equivalents, the European Commission etc were all asked to give their opinion. None came and a specific empty chair was put on the stage showing that they did not take part.
Harash Narang now claims to have an ELISA test that may indicate bovine infection in urine.
This is now under study in cattle in the UK and in urine from cattle in Germany. I dont know much about the method or the scientific layout of the test but he is quite determined that this sort of test will take place.
The announcement today (11.11.96) that the Department of Health is to carryout a research program into BSE.
So far what they are actually going to do does not seem to be very big. They claim to be going to inoculate monkeys with BSE for instance and yet there are arguments that this is now of little value and Dr. Jarrett in Glasgow was turned down funding to do it in 1989. Also, when the results from the other monkeys arrived it was denied by the DofH as being significance e.g. the marmosets in 1992.
The Horizon team are going to put out a program on the 18th and 19th of November which will not be good news.
The team say that the groups they interviewed did not generally look on the future with glee and, while they could not prove there was to be a major epidemic, they should be assuming it until proved otherwise.
It now seems that the Americans are under pressure to change their production methods for MBM.
It has been claimed that WHO has now advised all countries to follow the UK line and ban the feeding of cattle with bovine products. Richard Marsh has recently given a major lecture saying that he finds this action necessary.
The announcement that older cattle waiting for slaughter would be culled first.
This is in the group of cattle waiting for culling in the over 30 month group. Some will be young and simply past the sell-by date, but the older milkers will be actually producing milk while they are waiting. Surely it would be cleverer to slaughter the young ones first as they are not producing anything, just eating expensive feed. Well, one thing is sure; if you slaughter the older cattle first you will decrease the number of reported cases of BSE and so produce an apparent decrease in the number of cases in the UK. In fact it will make no difference to the number of infected cattle whatever; the effect will be apparent and the true numbers will now be impossible to calculate as no age distribution data of cattle in the population are now available.
For the first time the Public Health Service is looking into BSE
(at the PHLS on the 19th Nov). For a long time BSE was simply not a subject of theirs and they were told that there was no risk to humans anyway. Although this discussion includes a couple of relatively conservative speakers I would expect the audience to not accept all is well.
The Horizon program is looking even more as if it is to be a horror story.
It now appears that they managed to get a lot of the scientists to speak their mind to the camera. This is really not what Her Majesty's Government will want to hear as they have spent a long time making sure that the scientists kept totally quiet and put down external researchers as 'pie in the sky'.
The Labour party does not seem to understand
that it will have to pay for the errors made by the Tories when it gets in to power. Word is going around that the Labour party feels that it would have done better than the Tories and so it would not have to spend so much money. This seems very unlikely but apparently it is difficult to get them to realise that they must blame it all on the tories before they arrive. Complex politics. Probably similar things are going on in Europe.
Brian Marchant (EC agriculture major official) is being grilled by the EC Parliamentary Committee very soon.
It may come through that he was given all the data avaiable indicating that BSE infected cattle were being exported from the UK in 1993 and again more exact data in 1995. For some reason little was done and Marchant did not seem to organise action to be taken by EC.
The legal advisors, Irwin Mitchell are getting ready to sue to Government over their action on BSE and its risks to humans.
This was the same legal group that got the successful action taken over growth hormone and it now appears that the relatives of the vCJD have got their money together to take the legal action.
Blood transfusion problems.
It seems that various countries have researchers that are considering banning UK blood products and banning the donation of blood by UK donors. In the UK this has been looked at but nothing decided. SEAC have been asked for their opinion in private but Rob Will is the member on the panel that seems to know something about it and may well have said (like he did about BSE in general) that there is no problem. Until we know the prevalence of the disease among the population we cannot state the risk level.
The Horizon program was a bit of a flop in terms of showing who was to get the disease.
However it did make it clear that the populus had been put at risk until 1995 and a large human experiment had been taken. It seems unlikely that much will come of the program. At least Paul Brown spoke out to make it clear that the entire UK population will have been exposed to the disease. Also the program stated that invalid research was carried out to look for infection in tissues and that we did not know if the disease was cumulative. See Horizon. One of the problems of the program was that 2 entertaining ones were showing concurrently on other channels.
It seems that various new vCJD-like cases are on the way.
The Central Public Health Laboratory is now (8 years late) becoming involved.
Pat Wall, Kate Soultan, and some others are being involved in risks from blood transfusion and following up the epidemiology to try to get some idea as to the way the epidemic is going to rise in the human population.
The Italians are looking harder for methods of treatment.
The most noticable thing is that they are actually being funded by UpJohn-Pharmacia, who have put a lot of money into looking for treatments for Alzheimer's disease. They are now trying with iodoxorubicin, a poisonous anti-cancer agent.
It now seems that MAFF are still quite determined not to release their data.
One group has been pressing them for the past few months and have still got almost nowhere. The possibility has now come out that they may well give the data out if the recipient is willing to pay for it and it is the expense of supplying this data that is the real problem. This is hardly impressive as quarterly age distribution curves of diagnosed cases can hardly be difficult for their computer.
Rendering changes caused BSE?
Word is going around that fewer people are now accepting the idea that it was the change in the feed manufacturing methods that caused the outbreak of BSE. There are many reasons why this would not have been right anyway but no proof is present. It seems that scientists are now getting a bit fed up with MAFF assuming that its best guesses are right and not carrying out research to check.
The DofH seems to want the drug companies to get in on this one.
The MRC and DofH may well be getting together with the drug companies soon to organise a research plan to look for a method of treatment for vCJD. Apparently this meeting has already been organised.
Evidence is now available showing that MAFF told the vets that reported the first few cases of BSE not to tell anyone of their findings.
This appears now to be on tape in that one of the TV companies has it and is waiting for the best time to show.
Collinge at the meeting in Preston was happy that the disease was not likely to be apocalyptic in size in the UK.
But he did say that we must get ready and assume that many people are yet to die of it.
Stan Prusiner has got a separate company that will sell his transgenic mice.
It appears that the transgenic mice are also chaemeric and hence will carry that factor from the mouse PrP to interact with mouse X factor...and hence there would be little problem crossing the species barrier. Collinge's work depends on the X factor not being very important. I cannot find anyone so far that has bought any.
UpJohn Pharmacia seem to be willing to look ahead with potential treatment for CJD: and the stockmarket backed them.
However their shares were doing badly. Stockholm, originally, said that Pharmacia, the Swedish/US drugs group, had reassured the market, posting earnings in line with expectations after a profit warning which produced a severe drop in the share price about three weeks ago. There was a parallel story linking the group's doxorubicin bladder cancer drug with a possible BSE treatment and the shares hit SKr251, up SKr8 at best. What it shows is that the stockmarket were willing to put up the price of the shares because the company were willing to look into potential methods of treatment.

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