If you were of an age in 1996 to understand the news, the thought has probably passed through your mind at least a few times since then; whatever happened to that new variant CJD we were all supposed to die of after those bovines went spongiform?
Mad Cow Disease: The Great British Beef Scandal (BBC Two) explored that question, along with one that now appears almost rhetorical, given the subsequent erosion of faith in those who are meant to govern in our best interests. Namely, how did a public health crisis of such proportions arise out of an industry that should have been scrupulously monitored when raising cattle, providing beef and controlling all links in a particular food supply chain, by a vigilant Ministry of Agriculture? The answers are … not comforting.
First, we are whisked back to 1987 to recap the origins of the crisis. Proust had his madeleines – we have footage of splay-legged, trembling cows, their nervous systems being eaten alive by a mysterious disease that would eventually become known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). It was later shown to be the result of producers, under pressure to make meat more cheaply, grinding up the remains of dead cattle and feeding it back to their herds to save money on grain. Alas, it seems that turning herbivores into cannibals was A Bad Move. No one could have known, obviously.
No more could they have known, surely, that putting mechanically recovered meat (all the bits of a cow you wouldn’t dream of eating, such as spinal columns and brain matter, pressure-cooked into sludge) into burgers and sausages for humans to eat, would work out any better. A generation of people had grown up ingesting the 1m infected cows that had entered our food chain by the time feeding cows to cows was banned in 1988. Amid a maelstrom of competing possibilities and interests – farmers, big business, political fallout and, somewhere among it all, the chance that BSE could cross the species barrier – the first three shall always be first. The minister of agriculture at the time, John Gummer, assured the public that year there was no risk to them from BSE. He “absolutely guaranteed” that British beef, whose producers had by then lost about 60% of sales, was safe to eat. In an interview for the programme now, he assures us: “We had no evidence of a threat to people.”
The microbiologist Stephen Dealler challenged the government’s claim publicly, citing research that suggested BSE was far more capable of jumping species than people assumed. He was moved from his research lab. But that didn’t stop the first beef-fed cats being diagnosed with the disease and then, in 1995, the first of what would become nearly 200 human diagnoses. Stephen Churchill died at 19 of a human form of BSE – variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. More followed. All with no prospect of cure or treatment for a disease that ate them from the inside. Scientists such as Prof Jeff Almond, who had already been concerned by the situation, realised: “Jesus wept – now we’re in deep shit.” Government advice to keep chowing down on cheap processed meat changed. The disease was discovered to be transmissible through blood, so donations began to be filtered. About 6,000 people had already received contaminated transfusions. Three deaths resulted.
Annie McVey remembers her daughter, Claire, who died of vCJD at 15, visibly deteriorating every day on a family trip to Disney World. “I wanted to know who to blame because I wanted to go round and break their legs, really. I wanted them to look at what they’d done.” Waves of grief and rage roll off her still. Every year, she sends certain people an email. “I’ve got a hit list. At Christmas I remind them all. I say: ‘You did this. When you sit down to your Christmas lunch, we sit down to an empty space. Because of the choices you made. So when you make your next choice in parliament or in business, make sure it’s a good one. Because they have consequences.’”
The programme’s admirable lucidity and careful tracking of the timelines was illuminated and humanised by several accounts from parents bereaved by this man-made disease and man-aggravated crisis.
It remained lucid and careful as it turned to the future, and started evaluating the evidence that suggests we are due a second wave of cases. Next time, it will be among people with a genetic predisposition towards longer incubation periods than the first patients had. This genetic predisposition is shared by half the British population. There is still no test for whether you are carrying the nvCJD infection. We’ll still have to wait and see what the consequences of saving money on cattle feed will be.
