It would be best if I go through the history by its dates and give a good idea of what was in the mind of the researchers as the various things took place. It should be remembered that this is such a potentially bad disease that everyone was crossing fingers and hoping. As a result of this, many optimistic viewpoints were accepted where there was actually inadequate information to justify them.
Click onto the highlighted years to get a good idea of what was going on:A small farm in Surrey reported more than one cow developing a strange neurological disease. The cattle were killed, the brains removed, and the animals destroyed. When it was found that the cattle had a disease never reported before the farmer wanted to publish the data but was told not to by MAFF. When it is calculated, it seems that approximately 100 cattle had developed BSE symptoms before 1987 and many more would have been infected.
It is now suggested that MAFF had been shown cattle with this disease before, and may have known about it in 1983, but did nothing.
Southwood, in the statement that was published stated that there would be minimal risk to humans as all infected cattle would be slaughtered. By not eating the animals with clinical illness there would be no problem and, as the disease was simply scrapie, and scrapie did not spread to humans, we should not expect BSE to spread to any other animals. Humans could continue to eat bovine brain and not worry about the consequences.
The answer to BSE was to prevent all bovine material from entering the food that was fed to cattle. This was brought into action in July 1988. The feed manufacturers were warned that this was going to happen several months in advance. The reporting of cases of BSE to MAFF was made obligatory and half the value of a non-sick animal was given in compensation.
The scientific community was surprised by the relative inaction recommended by Southwood. The committee that was set up by Southwood, known as the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, immediately recommended that specific offals (brain, spleen, thymus, tonsil, gut) should be discarded and that all clinically ill cattle should be destroyed by incineration or burial. By this time BSE had been transmitted to mice in the laboratory and apparently to various zoo animals through the eating of the same feed. Compensation for farmers reporting cases of BSE was only half the value of the cow.
The CJD surveillance unit was set up in Edinburgh to find out if BSE was giving rise to extra cases of CJD. The Parliamentary Agriculture Committee follows a media scare on the risks from BSE. John Gummer, at the time the Minister for Agriculture, tries to give his daughter a beefburger in front of the cameras outside parliament (she refused). By this time the numbers of cases were reaching 300 per week. Compensation was stepped up to the full value of the cow and numbers continued to rise. The German Government decided that it would not accept British beef as food in their country because of the risk that it potentially had to their population. Gummer was furious and demanded that less strict laws be taken through the EC Agriculture Committee. The amount of compensation payable to farmers for a case of BSE was increased. Lacey demanded that all infected herds should be slaughtered and that restocking should take place from abroad. Roger Eddy made it clear that he may have seen cases of BSE before the epidemic and suggested that scrapie may not have been its source at all. Gummer made it absolutely clear to the National Consumer Council that beef was safe and said that there was no risk whatever. A domestic cat develops what we are now sure was BSE. An American had inoculated scrapie into a cow and it developed a SE...but under the microscope it was not the same as BSE. Various schools ban beef in meals. The centre for agricultural research in Reading demanded that MAFF let professional independent researchers carry out the research into BSE as the results MAFF was releasing led to hysteria. Kiethley News shows that the number of BSE cases was building up so fast that the various parts of the animal could not be incinerated and had to be buried on a local tip. Beef consumption in the UK dropped to the lowest level since 1962. It becomes clear that many of the cases of CJD were never reported. 65% of doctors 'changed their habit of eating beef' due to BSE. All offal banned from export to the EC. A marmoset monkey inoculated with BSE dies.
A cheetah and the puma died of a TSE now thought to be BSE in the food that they had eaten. It was not clear, however how this could have been through eating brain, as they were never fed this. Fatal familial insomnia is found to be a SE and due to a genetic change. How now mad cow?: an editorial in the BMJ saying that we simply did not have enough knowledge to pronounce BSE as safe. Only 85% of cattle reported as BSE turned out to be that when looked at under the microscope: the same percentage found with mice infected with scrapie. More information appears concerning the epidemic of growth hormone and graft transmission of CJD.
Spending by this time had reached 74.4 million in compensation.
The number of cases was still rising with approximately 800 cases reported in each week. The vets were now being told that many of the cases that they accepted were not actually infected when the animal's brains were looked at under the microscope for evidence of disease; little evidence was ever presented for this and the rate for negatives seemed to remain at approximately 15%. Changes were made in the way that cattle could be sold. The vets that had been at the auctions were decreased in hours and a computer system was organised so that the ear tags on a cow could be used to find out if it was from an infected herd or not. Dealler publishes the data showing that, even using underestimation methods, that the risk to humans was unacceptably high for medical ethics to accept. Farmers were often no longer being asked at the auction if their cattle were from an infected herd and they were receiving better prices from the buyers as a result. Two dairy farmers with BSE in their herds, Mark Duncan and Peter Warhurst, were found to have died of CJD. MAFF claim that there was no infectivity in any tissue outside the central nervous system. A group of chemicals was found that prevented the growth of the infective agent of scrapie in the test tube. The mice without the prion protein gene were grown and found not to be open to infection with scrapie.
Victoria Rimmer, the 16 year old from North Wales was claimed to be dying of CJD and for this to be due to having eaten BSE-infected cattle. Cattle meat was being exported for sale in Europe without evidence that it did not come from a BSE-free herd. Claims were made that pressure was being put on the vets to sign certificates without evidence. The computer system that had been set up was now found to be ineffective. It could only take information from the abattoirs and could not supply information as to whether a cow that was being slaughtered was from an infected herd or not. London Zoo revealed that it was planning to remove the top foot of soil from the Kudu enclosure and was destroying any faecal matter from the animals; meanwhile it was being denied that the soil of farms could become infected and that cattle could become endemically infected. The large number of cattle with BSE that had been born after the feed ban suggested that endemic infection, or vertical infection from the mother, could be taking place. MAFF denied this risk. Infectivity found in the gut of a 6 month old veal calf that had been fed BSE when very young. All gut and thymus from calves could not then be eaten. Animal protesters attempted to stop the export of calves for veal production but little information was passed to European countries about the risk from BSE. No calculations were released about the amount of these tissues that had already been eaten. The start of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Research Campaign. The Germans were unimpressed by 'safe beef pledge' from UK. The EC now made it essential that any meat on the bone being exported could only come from herds unaffected with BSE in the previous 6 years. Gillian Shephard had thought of this as a success and came back and told the newspapers. They quickly realised it was a defeat. A farmer suggests that organophosphorus insecticides may be important in the cause of BSE. CJD reported as being in a similar prevalence in many European countries. It is admitted that, of 156 cases of CJD since 1990, 22 are believed to have given blood at some stage. CJD in a butcher from Whitby. Waldergrave takes over as Minister at MAFF. It was shown that abattoirs were attempting to export beef that was from infected herds and that the computer, supposedly carrying the information about all the cattle, was not permitted to give that information out for data control reasons.
It became clear that 1.8 million infected cattle would be eaten from UK farms by the year 2001 and that most of these had already been eaten. Underreporting of cases in 1992 and 1993 was shown to reach 60%. A further farmer died of CJD and a second, was dying of what seemed to be the disease. Both were from BSE affected farms. Two teenagers (including Stephen Churchill) developed CJD. Only 4 teenagers had been reported with CJD at any time throughout the world. It now became clear that the feed ban that took place in 1988 was too late. In fact, around 90% of the dairy cattle in the UK turned out being in an infected herd and, due to the apparently limited in-herd rate it seemed that the disease was, by 1988 running out of cattle to involve. If the ban had been in 1987 the number of affected cattle would have been less than half.
This was followed by a melt down of the credibility of MAFF and the newspapers and TV were determined to make this happen. The European Union quickly banned the export of cattle from the UK and all bovine products and the viewpoint of the Spongiform encephalopathy advisory Committee (SEAC) was that the actions taken so far was probably all that was needed as long as the directions were really carried out. It was soon made clear that these directions were not. The renderers had been permitting tissue from infected cattle to reach further cattle food, the farmers had been permitting cattle with infection to reach human food also. It was admitted on the TV that certain tissues from a cow should not be accepted as being safe unless deboned in specific places and overseen. The farmers could not take the effect from the EU and demanded that cattle over 30 months not be eaten but slaughtered as if they had BSE when they went to slaughter at the end of their milking lives. This was followed by an uproar in the press and demands from the EU that this was carried out. Hogg backed down and put forward plans concerning major slaughter policies to the EU. They said they were completely inadequate and demanded a greater action. Hogg put up the slaughter from 40,000 to eventually 147,000 but even that was not good enough for some members as they saw no way to get rid of all infected cattle. Mr. Major was determined to complain at the way that the EU had put a ban on the UK beef and refused to allow further EU major action unless this ban was removed after several weeks of the UK preventing EC action, and just before a conference the EC they would permit the decrease in the ban and Major declared that he had won. In fact the EC hardly offered anything and any cut in the ban depended on further demands of the EC at later dates.
It became clear after 19th of July SEAC meeting that there had been vertical transmission of BSE between dam and calf. The disease was not likely to leave the UK for many years and, even though MAFF said that 2005 would be good, anyone looking at the figures could see that these were very hopeful.
Shortly afterwards it was announced that sheep could easily become infected from BSE and, as we had infected plenty of cattle, there is no reason why sheep could not already be infected. The French quickly put a brain and spinal cord offals ban on all sheep for human consumption and the same may appear in the UK.
The prevention of information being released was made clear in a major Nature article in September and this was followed by calls for the release of the information. MAFF agreed... but it has still not happened to any great degree (by Dec 1996).
Indications that new variant CJD really was derived from BSE came when Collinge's group in London showed them to be of the same glycoform (i.e. had similar sugar chains attatched).
The European Commission had by this time been shown to have deliberately played down BSE and its potential problems all the way through and that there had been a sort of agreement to silence among the Agriculture Commission. The European Parliament found this intolerable and set up a separate committee to look into the matter. This decided that the silence from the EC was intolerable and that many of the official groups were guilty of inaction. Eventually the Governments and the research groups stirred themselves to produce specific research committees and timetables.
The dreadful misleading of the population and parliament and the confusion of the farmers by MAFF action, even though they had seen their action as been for the good of farming in the UK, all became much clearer to the population. Even though beef infection had almost been accepted by the UK population, who did not stop to the same degree as those in Europe eating it, it was clear that to get rid of the disease was going to be difficult and may be expected to take many years.
By the end of the year it seems that the UK Government have admitted that little beef will be exported for many years and that they will have to carry out the cull of animals that was temporarily dropped by MAFF. Also, the highly expensive actions (mentioned at 3.2 billion pounds by Tony Blair in December 1996) did not take into account the realisation that huge amounts of research were going to have to be done.
The Tory Government was crushed in the election, which showed the greatest Labour majority ever and a new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was willing to make peace with the European neighbours. The new Agriculture Minister, Dr. Jack Cunningham, was apparently much more understanding of the problems than his predecessors and immediately stated that he did not expect the EC to back down while a risk was present and the only way out was to remove the risk, initialy by permitting Northern Ireland beef (the area with the fewest cases and good computer regulation of cattle), and then allowing this to spread to other areas as they improved. He announced that the costs would be over 3.5 billion pounds and gradually, as the year went on he admitted that the figure may well turn out to be much greater.
The scientific publication by Moira Bruce that BSE, when inoculated into mice produced the same disease as nvCJD was the nail in the coffin for the continuing groups that claimed that the association between the two 'was not proved' (and therefore should not be assumed).
Dolly the sheep appeared as a sheep made from a single breast cell (named after Dolly Parson, the singer with the large breasts) and it was realised that the making of sheep that could not develop BSE or scrapie was at last possible. Research money arrived for this.
The major researchers for MAFF in the field; Tony Austen and Mike Richards left them and the research money started to flow into the medical side as the ban on Public Health involvement in the subject was 'lifted'.
The realisation that blood transfusion could represent a risk hit the press but was overrun by other subjects. This became a major problem for the Government behind the scenes as there appeared to be no way in which UK blood could be looked on as being totally safe. Eventually the blood products manufacturers realised that this was indeed true and looked for any way in which they could keep going and the foreign suppliers moved in. The Haemophilia society and the Directors of the Haemophilia Centres (the doctors that proscribe the drugs) made it clear that they did not want UK factor 8 etc.
It was announced that various other tissues would be included in the list of Specified Bovine Materials: bone, the dorsal root ganglia, and the lung (the lung part hardly seemed to reach the press). This was handled well by the new Government and the media ended up asking why they had banned them at all as the 'risk was so low'.
The announcement that there was to be a public judicial inquiry into BSE and nvCJD up until 1996 was announced by Jack Cunningham but the scientific advisors to Lord Justice Phillips are not yet named. They are likely to be some of the most important people in the inquiry as they will direct him towards certain aspects of the epidemic. The aim is to find out why it all took place, and why such poor action was taken. The inquiry has to report before the end of 1998.
During the year about 12 further cases of nvCJD appeared, compensation reached approximately 1 billion pounds, research budgetting was in some quarters put as 'unlimited', and nvCJD was admitted to be BSE by the UK Government.
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