BSE spectre has haunted British farmers for decades

BSE was discovered by pathologist Carol Richardson in September 1985.

She had been examining a cow’s brain tissue in a laboratory in Surrey and identified patterns that she had seen many times before in sheep affected by scrapie, a fatal disease.

But it would be another 18 months before her research was published in the periodical The Veterinary Record.

It was suspected that feeding cattle with the remains of other livestock could have been the root of the problem and in 1989 the UK Government banned this practice.

Then in 1989 the government banned the use of bovine offal in all human food due to fears the disease could be spread to humans.

There still remained uncertainty over the danger posed to humans, however, and the government was keen to safeguard the reputation of British beef.

Infamously, the then-agriculture minister John Gummer enlisted his fouryear-old daughter to eat a burger on TV in an effort to reassure the public.

At the height of the epidemic in 1992-93, three in every 1,000 cows were said to be affected.

The number of instances began to decline towards the middle of the decade, with the government’s chief medical officer insisting beef was safe.

However, in 1995 tragedy struck when 19-yearold Stephen Churchill died after an illness resembling Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

By 1996, there had been eight cases of the variant CJD, mostly in young people.

The Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) advised the government that March that the most likely cause of this new disease was eating beef products contaminated with the BSE agent.

There was widespread panic and the European Union and other countries banned all exports of British beef.

The government introduced new measures in an attempt to contain the disease, including a selective cull of animals reared alongside those with BSE between 1989 and 1993.

Between 1986 and 2001, more than 180,000 cattle were infected and 4.4 million slaughtered during the eradication program.

It is understood there have been about 11 cases in the UK since 2011, with the most recent in Wales in 2015.

“More than 180,000 cattle were slaughtered”