Disease that has claimed 178 lives

THE last recorded case of BSE in Scotland was in November 2008 in the Highlands, two years after Brussels lifted a ban on British beef exports.

The last case in Britain was in Carmarthenshire, Wales, in 2015 when the disease was found after a cow died.

Between 1986 and 2001 more than 180,000 animals across Britain were infected and four million cattle slaughtered to stop the disease spreading.

The outbreak sparked a health scare surrounding British beef. John Selwyn Gummer, then agriculture minister, famously fed his four-year-old daughter a beefburger in 1990 in front of TV news cameras in a bid to the convince the nation British beef was safe.

A year earlier the use of cow’s brains and spinal cords in animal feed was banned.

But in 1996, the Government was forced to admit there was a link between BSE and the human form of the disease, new variant CJD.

The EU banned the export of British beef – a ban that would last ten years – and the market collapsed as culls were carried out of cattle most at risk.

The UK death toll from vCJD stands at 178 since Stephen Churchill died aged 19 in 1995 of a fatal brain condition linked to BSE. Only one person has died in the UK since 2012.