-Caveat Lector-
>>What's scary is the extent to which the beef may have been distributed ... and how
long ago, as in "Lend-Lease" and post-war occupation forces ("sponging", i.e.) ...
A<>E<>R <<<
>From World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe: Britain
British government admits to 250,000 possible variant CJD deaths
By Julie Hyland
3 November 2000
Back to screen version
The Blair government has doubled its estimation of the possible number of victims of
variant Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease (vCJD), caused by eating beef infected with "mad
cow disease" (BSE-Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) from 136,000 to 250,000,
according to the BBC. The revision means that the government is now working on a
"worst case scenario" of one in every 250 people in Britain dying from the disease.
Variant CJD is a fatal brain wasting disease beginning typically with depressive-
type symptoms, lack of coordination and unspecified pains, before progressing to
complete helplessness, blindness and certain death. As yet there is no proven means
of arresting the disease's progress, let alone curing it.
The revised estimate was made public just days after Judge Lord Phillips published
the final report of the government-convened inquiry into BSE. After a two-year
investigation, Phillips' report did not make any criticisms of the food industry,
whose practices lie at the heart of the scandal, or of former government ministers,
despite acknowledging their efforts to cover-up the crisis.
Phillips conclusion that no one could be held responsible for the worst food health
disaster in Britain was not surprising. The incoming Labour government, which
convened the Inquiry in 1997, intended it mainly as a means of defusing public anger
over a crisis that had played a significant role in eroding support for the previous
Conservative government.
The official BSE report was followed by the announcement that the Labour government
would ensure a care and compensation package to the families of those who died.
Agriculture Secretary Nick Brown, speaking on BBC TV's Breakfast with Frost
programme, admitted that the number of people who will die from vCJD could grow
"much, much larger". He summed up official indifference to the terrible fate that
could befall many families by claiming the numbers were "just predictions", whilst
taking the opportunity to promote the British beef industry. "I eat British beef, I
know British beef is amongst the safest in the world," Brown stated.
Also speaking to the BBC, Professor John Collinge, of the BSE Advisory Committee,
took issue with the "false optimism and wishful thinking, which has bedevilled", the
BSE investigation "for too long." "We might be seeing an epidemic that involves
hundreds of thousands of people. Let's hope that's not the case, but it's still
possible", he said.
Putting the risks into context, microbiologist and leading CJD expert Dr Stephen
Dealler said on average people in the UK had eaten 50 meals made from the tissue of
an infected animal. "At the moment the number of cases of CJD we are seeing are
doubling every year. If they double for a long time then the numbers are in
millions, if they double for just a few years then the numbers are in thousands. At
the moment it is very difficult to know," Dealler said. The Report from the official
BSE Inquiry found that a cow could be infected with BSE by eating contaminated
material the size of a peppercorn.
Government adviser Professor Roy Anderson said that news that a 74-year old man had
died from vCJD last year�most known victims have been younger�necessitated a major
re-evaluation of the possible scale of the crisis. Anderson's earlier computer
predictions had forecast that up to 6,000 people had been infected between 1980 and
1996. That figure could now rise as high as 130,000 as there is concern that many
elderly people with vCJD could have been wrongly diagnosed as suffering from
Alzheimer's disease, which has similar symptoms.
Fears of a vCJD epidemic have also been heightened by news that a cluster pattern of
cases may be occurring in a former South Yorkshire mining village. Accountant Sarah
Roberts, 28, of Armthorpe, Doncaster, died in September only nine weeks after she
was diagnosed with vCJD. Her former neighbour and friend Matthew Parker, 19, who
attended the same school, died of vCJD in 1997.
It has now been revealed that a third victim of vCJD, former RAF policeman Adrian
Hodgkinson, 25, had made regular visits to Armthorpe to see his grandmother every
weekend between 1972 and 1986. If a link is proven it would indicate that the three
victims may have been infected by the same source. The CJD surveillance unit at
Edinburgh University is exploring the possible link. If Doncaster does reveal a
cluster it will be the second such grouping in Britain. Last month, a fifth person
in the Leicestershire village of Queniborough died from suspected vCJD, following
the deaths of four others who had lived there or had connections with the village.
Despite this, Prime Minister Blair continued to claim that the issue was one of
"finding the balance between risk and public protection measures". This is a "cost-
effective" approach, which argues that any regulatory measures that may interfere
with profits are only justifiable when a certain death toll has been reached. This
was the argument utilised by the Conservative government when BSE first emerged in
order to reject intervention into the food industry on the grounds that the risk to
public health was "minimal". So for example, when the government was working
previously on a "central figure" of 6,000 deaths from vCJD it was not considered
cost-effective to extend the ban on feeding cannibalised remains to livestock or
introduce further safety measures, for fear of outraging major land and food
interests. These had already reacted angrily to even banning the sale of beef on the
bone, claiming it represented a serious threat to civil liberties.
Even now, faced with a mountain of evidence showing the link between BSE in cattle
and vCJD in humans, there are those who still view the BSE crisis as a virtual
conspiracy against the British beef industry. An editorial in the Daily Telegraph
last week fulminated, �While it is still unclear whether 77 horrible vCJD deaths are
connected with the BSE crisis, other disasters can be directly relate to the whole
affair, chief among them the extremist ban of beef on the bone and the collapse of
the British beef industry.�
It is a sign of how reluctant the government has been to enforce the necessary
safety measures in the food industry that only now is it considering introducing a
complete ban on feeding animal remains to other animals�a major factor in the rapid
spread of BSE in cattle. As yet the current ban on feeding recycled meat and bone
meal does not cover many animals including pigs, poultry and fish or the use of
cows' blood in feed manufacture because blood was deemed free of the infective
prions associated with BSE.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) made the recommendation to extend the ban after
scientists proved in laboratory tests that BSE could be transferred to sheep.
Although there is yet no evidence of BSE infecting sheep in the field, there are
concerns that it could be masked by scrapie, a disease that has similar symptoms and
has been present in the national flock for 200 years without apparently proving any
risk to humans. Many scientists believe that BSE originated as a mutation of scrapie
after it crossed the species barrier between sheep and cows through the ingestion of
cannibalised remains in feed or shared grazing land. An FSA spokesman said urgent
screening was required to establish any risk, but this would take years to reach any
conclusion. In the meantime, the Ministry of Agriculture is to draw up contingency
plans for dealing with any future discovery of BSE in sheep, including a blanket ban
on consumption and the slaughter of millions of animals.
Copyright 1998-2000
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
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Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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