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Re: BSE panic ends.



In article <bnDpLBAVPjcxEwN2@upthorpe.demon.co.uk>,
Oz  <Oz@upthorpe.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>The European Agriculture Commissioner, Frank Fischler stated to Reuters 
>yesterday that there was no health risk in eating British beef

I suspect that it will take more than confident statements from Frank 
Fischler and the pseudonymous "Oz" to set minds at rest on this one.
Who was that British minister who fed his young daughter a beefburger 
for the benefit of TV cameras a year or two ago? I wonder how he feels now. 


>From  The Manchester Guardian Weekly, week ending November 26, 1995 (page 10):

Renewed fears that "mad cow disease" - bovine spongiform encephalopathy 
(BSE) - could lead to an epidemic of the Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD)
in humans were raised by a medical microbiologist, who questioned the
government's assertion that the public were not at risk.

Dr Stephen Dealler, writing in the British Food Journal, claimed that
most adult British meat-eaters will, by 2001, have injested a potentially    !!
fatal dose of meat infected with BSE. The disease was thought to have been   !!
caused by feeding cattle with infected foodstuffs. That practice was ended 
in 1988, but 18,000 cases of BSE have been reported since, and even the
Ministry of Agriculture suspects that cases are under-reported.

Dr Dealler said that the medical and dietary professions should question
the present policy of "waiting passively" to see if the incidence of CJD
rises in the UK. Present methods of diagnosing CJD were inadequate, he
said, and "aggressive" and long-term research was needed.

-- end --

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