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Re: BSE panic ends.



In article <4l0s3d$p6d@news.informix.com>, Paul Roberts
<proberts@lynx.informix.com> writes
>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. 

Not too bad, I expect. We are not all infected by hysteria you know.

>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.

Yup, prove a negative again. You may be interested that Prof Lacey and
Dealler are collaborators. So the doom and gloom is not unexpected, a
shortage of facts is, of course.

>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.

Well, see, there's this thing about it taking five to ten years after
infection before clinical symptoms appear, and it is generally accepted
that some feed in store etc was used up to 1990. I could go on, but many
readers in several of the groups posted have heard it all before.
Needless to say the decline is exactly what the Govt epidemiologists
prediced in 1988, so surprise surprise.

>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.

Well! Waiting passively? Give me strength! The disposal of 180,000 head
since 1988 is hardly 'waiting passively'. The setting up of research
programs so as to identify the risks, many of which have published since
1988. The removal of a whole stack of offals of ALL cattle on the off
chance that one might be sub-clinically infected so as to remove the
risk (most of which have turned out not to be infective anyway). The
paying of more than adequate compensation for any animal even suspected
of having BSE. A cost of many many tens of millions of pounds sterling.
Passively??!!###@@@

Well, I suppose 'not passively' would mean funding Deallers department
with a nice fat grant, as happened in Edinburgh.

------------------------------- 
'Oz     "When I knew little, all was certain. The more I learnt,
        the less sure I was. Is this the uncertainty principle?"



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