Subject: Re: BSE. Slaughter of UK Cattle Herd? Urgent/Serious

From: Oz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 1996 08:17:02 +0000

In article <[email-masked]>, Peter Dean
<[email-masked]> writes
>The slaughter of the entire UK cattle herd is now being considered as
>a measure to eradicate BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) after
>health secretary Stephen Dorrell told MPs that government advisers
>believed exposure to BSE was the most likely cause of ten recent British
>cases of a new strain of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease.(CJD)
>
>This is serious  I would appreciate hard facts - serious comment and
>informed debate please.

It's hard to have informed debate without the facts. A few were given in
the press about what was considered might be a new strain of CJD. As I
understand it there have been ten cases worldwide in the last few years.
Apparently the difference was that the people concerned were young (sub
45) but no different pathology was mentioned. There is the problem of
the word "new". With such a rare disease as CJD, under one death per
million population, which until recently hasn't really been studied at
all, to find different natural strains wouldn't be unexpected. Take a
look at the history of the various Hepatitis strains, for example, which
is a major problem, particularly with hospital staff. So it's very
unclear that the strain is 'new' as in 'well we never looked much before
and now we have found one' or 'new' as in 'it didn't exist before'. It
will be a long time before we have any idea of this. Personally I
suspect that it's a pre-existing strain. Why? Well one of the people who
went down with it lived the last 12 years in Australia, allowing a few
months for the researchers to publish etc, this would mean that he left
the UK in 1982. This was a time when BSE was virtually non-existant, so
the chance of him even having come across any BSE beef is remote in the
extreme. Compare that with the millions who stayed in Britain eating
beef and it looks pretty shaky to me to say the least. Good publicity
for the researchers, of course, who can now be guaranteed plentiful
funding.

As to culling what amounts to almost the entire British cattle herd, one
has to ask why? What's the point? What does anyone gain? The disease is
very *un*infectious indeed. Even the maternal route that everyone was so
worried about six years ago, seems not to happen at all (at worst at a
staggeringly low rate) as predicted by the government vets. The decline
in cases has been almost spot on the predictions given, it's dropping at
about 25% per year if I remember correctly but at any rate it's way down
>from  the peak and falling fast. The abattoir controls are very strict
(excessively so according to many) so that even if contaminated material
did get slaughtered AND if BSE was infectious (looking very doubtful)
the risks would be very low anyway. So slaughtering the large part of
the UK herd gains you little, if anything.

One must also always bear in mind that the equivalent sheep disease
(scrapie) has been common in UK for centuries and the UK's level of CJD
is the same as other countries. This in itself indicates the cross-
species infectivity is at worst mindblowingly insignificant.

The overall cost of culling these animals was estimated by the London
Times to be around 200,000,000,000 pounds UK. Whichever way you look at
it this amounts to a cost per family in the UK of around 10,000 UK
pounds. Certainly the effect on the economy will be equivalent to this.
Inflation will increase, and interest rates will go up. A lot. One ought
to be pretty sure there is a point to this before proceeding. At present
there are none. No increase in CJD in UK even amongst very high risk
occupations like abattoir workers, vets and farmers. I believe the
highest group for CJD is taxi-drivers, although with only 50 cases a
year the statistics are bound to throw up this sort of oddity.

I would virtually guarantee that culling the UK herd will result in
substantial numbers of deaths by suicide amongst UK cattle farmers, the
slaghter of ten+ million of innocent and uninfected UK cattle to achieve
nothing. Any tiny number of people who might be infected would almost
certainly have to have caught it before controls were implemented so
this won't help them (if they exist).

It would be a classic and mindless case of shutting the door after the
horse has flown. In this case all the indications are that the horse was
never in the stable anyway.

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

---

From: [email-masked] (Nick Hill)
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 96 14:39:29 GMT

Could anyone share their thoughts on possible contamination of UK milk & 
dairy products?

Regards
Nick
[email-masked]
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