Socialist Equality Party : Human BSE crisis

SEP : Human BSE

"The BSE crisis is the dreadful result of this mad scramble for profits"

Edited version of the submission by Barbara Slaughter, investigative reporter for the International Worker.

For the past three months I have been investigating the BSE/CJD crisis, in order to provide answers to the questions which were posed when the Socialist Equality Party issued the call for this inquiry.

How and why did the BSE/CJD crisis develop and who is responsible?

My work has revealed that this crisis was entirely foreseeable and preventable, and that the Tory government and the meat industry bear direct and immediate responsibility for the deaths of the 17 people who have already died of new variant CJD and of the unknown number who will die in the future.

These culprits have been aided and abetted at every turn by other bodies.

Firstly, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), the Ministry of Health, and all other government departments which have lied to cover up the crisis.

Secondly, the government appointed scientific committees that have used their standing as experts to allay public fears. Thirdly, the parliamentary parties, all of which had access to detailed information about the crisis, but did not act on it.

Lastly, with the honourable exception of a few journalists and broadcasters, the media has played an entirely negative role. This has stretched from the deliberate cultivation of a sceptical tone in the quality press in order to minimise the issue, to the disgusting anti-European jingoism and xenophobic defence of "British beef" in the tabloids.

Whether directly or indirectly, everyone of these agencies put profits before the health and well-being of the people in this country and all over the world. The BSE crisis is the dreadful result of this mad scramble for profits.

First known cases

The first known case of BSE was recorded in April 1985, by Colin Whittaker, a vet practising in Ashford, a small town in Kent. A cluster of at least four cases of new variant CJD are currently being treated in the William Harvey Hospital, in that area.

In November 1986, the government's Central Veterinary Laboratory at Weybridge in Surrey announced the diagnosis of the disease. BSE is one of a group of diseases collectively termed transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs. Other forms include scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakobs Disease (CJD) in humans....

At first the cases of BSE were small in number, but this was to be the beginning of an epidemic, which by 1993 had increased to 36,755 new cases. By the end of 1987 420 cases of BSE had been identified on British farms. The disease was not notifiable and there was no control over infected herds.

In 1988 there were 2,185 confirmed cases of BSE. In 1989 the number was 7,136. In 1990 it was 14,180. The following year confirmed cases rose to 25,025. In 1993 there were 36,755 new cases of BSE in British cattle.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands of infected carcasses were entering the human food chain. There was concern within the scientific community about the dangers of BSE. But from the outset MAFF engaged in a campaign of "damage limitation". If it was shown that beef was unsafe to eat, it would destroy the industry. Therefore the government, MAFF and all the other agencies sought to prove that British beef was safe. Instead of initiating a comprehensive programme of research into the disease, MAFF insisted that BSE presented no dangers.

They argued that sheep scrapie had been around for hundreds of years and had not crossed the species barrier and therefore it followed that BSE was also a "dead-end host" and presented absolutely no danger. This was despite the fact that TSEs were known to vary in transmissibility from one species to another and that no one had yet accounted for the origin of BSE. MAFF continued to make these claims even after a range of mammals had been experimentally infected with BSE, and it had been diagnosed in cats and mink.

There is some controversy in the scientific community about the source of BSE -- whether it crossed species from sheep scrapie or whether it had existed in very small numbers in cattle for some time. It is generally agreed, however, that the epidemic was due to the widespread practice, in the 1980s, of including ruminant protein, in the form of meat and bonemeal derived from sheep and cattle remains, in cattle feed.

MAFF's role

In May 1988, fully 18 months after the disease was first identified, the government was forced to set up the Southwood Committee to consider the possible hazard that BSE might cause to human health. This committee of so-called "experts", did not include any of the small number of scientists like Professor Richard Lacey, Dr. Stephen Dealler and Dr. Harash Narang, who were currently researching into BSE. It was appointed by MAFF and was part of the government cover-up.

In July 1988, Southwood recommended that the practice of feeding cattle with animal remains should be banned. Their report, published in February 1989, supported the conclusion that cattle were a "dead-end host" and therefore were only a remote risk to humans. They conveniently predicted that because of the ban on recycling animal remains, the incidence of BSE would be reduced, would not exceed 20,000 in total and would die out altogether by 1994.

The Southwood report merely called for measures to exclude "known infected cattle" -- that is visibly sick cows -- from the human food supply, but at the same time it concluded that "the risk of transmission of BSE to humans appears remote."

The incidence of the disease continued to increase. The Tyrell Committee that was set up on the recommendation of Southwood to examine current research, proposed that the government should find out if there was a danger to human health by monitoring the incidence of CJD over the next 20 years! It was by then known that the incubation period for BSE was between five and 10 years, and it would probably be much longer in humans. So they were proposing to carry out the biggest experiment in human history, involving a deadly and incurable disease, by just waiting to see what happened. The deaths of Stephen Churchill, Peter Hall, Maurice Callaghan, Matthew Parker and the other young people we have commemorated at the beginning of this inquiry form a part of that sick experiment.

Pressure on the government increased and they had to do something, to dispel concerns. So on November 13,1989 -- that is three years after the identification of the first cases of BSE -- certain specified offals, from animals over six months old, were removed from the human food chain. These were the brains, spinal cords, spleen, intestine, thymus and tonsils, which were deemed to be the "most infectious" organs. They were also the offals of least commercial value.

There was no evidence whatsoever that infectivity was confined to these organs, yet MAFF and the government considered the problem solved. Between 1988 and 1991, despite the growing crisis, they had spent a paltry £3m on research. MAFF's task throughout, was not to ensure that beef was safe to eat, but to convince consumers to eat more of it.

Farmers were only being paid for carcass-cost in compensation and not the higher value of a cow at auction. This encouraged them not to report BSE cases in order to avoid huge losses and instead allow infected meat to be sold as good or to be disposed of illegally.

Lies begin to crumble

Despite the government's best efforts, however, their campaign of lies was beginning to crumble.

In April 1990, that is fully four years after BSE was first identified, Humberside County Council withdrew beef from school meals. Many others followed suit... Even more damaging for the Tories, 15 countries, including the US who had no economic interest in defending British beef, banned its import.

It was only after this and solely as a sop to growing concern, that in September 1990 the government banned the use of specified bovine offals from the feed of pigs and poultry. This was also after a pig had been experimentally infected with BSE... It has recently been revealed that the government suppressed a report that a number of dogs had contracted BSE from eating beef.

In February 1992, there was the first evidence of vertical transmission of BSE from cow to calf and fears that the disease was now endemic. In response, MAFF changed its procedure for confirming and slaughtering young cattle suspected of BSE and thereby reduced the statistics and increased the amount of infected material entering the human food chain.

In 1993, it was clear that cattle that were born after the feed ban was imposed were contracting BSE. MAFF denied that it was vertical transmission and blamed the illegal actions of the feed compounders and the farmers.

That year it was confirmed that two dairy farmers, in the Ashford area, who had been tending herds of BSE infected cattle, had died of CJD. The number of CJD cases in Britain was nearly 10 times greater than the annual number 25 years ago and twice as high as five years before.

In September 1993, a closed meeting of experts in Brussels suggested that the British government's assumption that BSE was unlikely to jump species might be unfounded. This report was suppressed for six months and when it did appear was reported as a single paragraph in a scientific journal. It was not taken up by the rest of the press. The incidence of BSE continued to rise.

In January 1994, CJD was diagnosed in a 16 year old girl in Wales. This was unprecedented. All previous cases had been limited to people over 40 years of age, but still the government continued to insist on the safety of beef. As late as 1995, John Major declared, "There is currently no scientific evidence that BSE can be transmitted to humans, or that eating beef causes CJD in humans. That issue is not in question."

The German government tried to tighten their restrictions on the import of British beef but couldn't get EU agreement. In Germany and Canada entire herds of cattle were slaughtered if one case of BSE was diagnosed.

In June 1994, the intestines of calves under six months old were banned from entering the human food chain. This flew in the face of the government's insistence that there was no possibility of vertical transmission of the disease. It also contradicts the current assertion that animal under 30 months cannot be infectious.

On July 18, 1994, Gillian Shephard was forced to accept a ban on the export of British beef carcasses to the EU unless the herd had been BSE free for six years.

In the very year that BSE was supposed to die out in Britain, there were 25,628 confirmed cases. The total number of cases since the beginning of the epidemic was 137,000, more than six times the number predicted by Southwood. Some respected scientists say the true number is more likely to be at least one million. By June 1994, 51% of all dairy farms in the UK had been affected by BSE.

Defending big business

What I have presented so far is a catalogue not of incompetence, but of lies on a scale that would have made Goebbels proud. It shows that at every turn an overwhelming body of evidence that BSE could cross the species barrier and infect humans was systematically suppressed. Respected scientists all over the world and 15 national governments had drawn the inescapable conclusion that British beef was dangerous. Yet the entire efforts of the government and of MAFF were geared up to palming off palliatives as solutions and denying the obvious.

The Tory government could have been brought down by this crisis. That is why they lied, schemed and trampled roughshod over all democratic procedures so as to defend their own backs and the profits of their friends in the beef industry. It is this criminal cover-up that prevented the situation being understood. The BSE/CJD crisis clearly demonstrates the relationship between big business and government. The Tories, the opposition parties and the media all defend the interests of the giant corporations and banks.

From being elected in 1979, the Tory government's policy was one of deregulating industry and the financial markets in order to enable them to be internationally competitive. That is why it gave the beef industry a free hand to make profits at any price, including people's health. Deregulation in the food industry was justified by MAFF as "reflecting the wish of ministers that in the present economic climate the industry should determine for itself how best to produce a high quality product".

Food production is now very big business indeed. Just 10 corporations control virtually every aspect of the world-wide food chain. Four of them control 90% of the world's export of corn, wheat, coffee, tea, pineapples, cotton, tobacco, jute and forest products. The same companies that control these commodities also handle the storage, the transport and the food processing.

The food industry is the largest manufacturing industry in Britain and UK owned corporations account for eight of Europe's major food and drink manufacturers -- including Unilever, Grand Metropolitan and Hillsdown. Approximately 70% of consumer spending goes on food. Supermarkets like Asda, Sainsbury's and Tesco dominate the market. To increase their profits they must compete against each other by constantly reducing costs. This means they must pressurise their suppliers, the renderers, the slaughterers and finally the farmers. Sales from the meat industry are worth £10bn per annum. The beef industry accounts for £4bn. MAFF and the government were prepared to go to any lengths to defend these business interests.

Any scientist who dared to oppose their policies and describe the situation that really existed, was victimised... The number of government scientists engaged in research into agriculture and food has been axed from 3,417 in 1979 to 2,003 today. Despite the crisis, the government cut science spending by 1% from last April, threatening government scientists with job losses, fewer contracts, political interference and selling off the Institute of Health.

Since BSE was made a notifiable disease in 1988, any BSE infected material automatically becomes the property of MAFF. They have used this to refuse access to specimens and prevent research taking place.

Dorrell's announcement

On March 20, 1996, the Tory Health Minister Stephen Dorrell, announced in Parliament that 10 people under the age of 42 had died from a new strain of CJD, and that the "possible' source of this disease was BSE infected beef. After 10 years of lies and cover-up, the government had been forced to make a guarded acknowledgement of the mounting and undeniable evidence of the connection between BSE and CJD.

The day before, on March 19, a neurologist told Frances Hall that it had been confirmed that her son Peter had died from new variant CJD.

Despite Dorrell's statement, the campaign of lies and misinformation not only continued but reached new heights. The government's chief scientific advisor was wheeled out to claim, "The most likely explanation at present is that these cases are linked to exposure to BSE before the introduction of the specified offal ban in 1989." Both government and the food corporations continued to insist that beef was "safe" and mounted a campaign that specifically targeted schools and supermarkets to get it back on the dinner tables and shelves.

I have obtained an internal document from the Meat and Livestock Commission dated two months before Dorrell's announcement, which shows that, rather than protecting the health of young children, who were the least likely to have already been exposed to infection, the MLC was targeting schools. The MLC calculated that parents see schools as institutions which safeguard the interests of children, so if schools were prepared to serve beef to children, it must be safe. Scientists, who are members of the government Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) were to be used to tackle education committees that had "gone away from beef". It also showed that the MLC was aware of the serious problem in the abattoirs regarding the removal of organs like the brain and spinal cord, which were most likely to be infected. Yet they continued to insist that beef was safe to eat.

The role of the Labour Party and of Europe

The cynicism of the government knew no limit. They claimed that eating beef was a patriotic way of standing up for Britain against the European Union's world ban on the export of British beef and derivatives that was imposed after Dorrell's announcement. The Labour Party encouraged this by wrapping themselves up in the Union Jack in order to blame "Europe", and especially "Germany", for the collapse of the beef industry.

It has to be said that far from Europe acting with indecent haste on the question of BSE, they were amongst the last to acknowledge the dangers. Despite warnings from scientists in their employ that BSE-infected beef was dangerous, they allowed its sale for over a decade. It was only when the profits of their own industry were threatened by a collapse in consumer confidence even greater than that in Britain that they acted to ban British beef products. Moreover they have concealed the extent to which BSE is prevalent in Europe's herds as far as has proved possible and the extent to which British produced animal feed was used all over Europe.

On August 19, 1996, a coroner ruled that 20 year old Peter Hall, contracted the disease through eating beef burgers as a child. This was the first legal ruling linking a human death to BSE in cattle. Since then a coroners' court in northern Ireland has attributed the cause of the death of 30 year old Maurice Callaghan to "exposure to BSE". And still the government and the industry are insisting that British beef is safe to eat. Still no individuals or institutions have been made to account for this disaster. No action is to be taken against those who continuously ruled out any risk to public health, nor those who supplied misleading information.

How beef was still declared "safe"

As evidence mounted over the connection between BSE and nvCJD, the stress of government propaganda shifted somewhat. Instead of a complete denial of the connection between the two diseases, there was speculation about how big a dose was necessary to infect a human, compared with a cow. The conclusion was the same -- that British beef was safe to eat. The government regularly cited statements by SEAC that muscle meat was safe and that the species barrier between cattle and humans was in the ratio of one to one thousand. In other words it needs a thousand times bigger dose to infect a human than to infect a cow.

However, one of the members of SEAC, Professor Richard Almond, revealed to the Canterbury Mills Inquiry, which I attended as part of my investigation, that SEAC was used by the government to make a statement on the safety of beef just before Dorrell made his announcement. SEAC was put under pressure and came up with the answer that muscle meat was likely to be safe. They used the species barrier of one to a thousand. It was a "best guess". Almond said, "If we had used a species barrier of one to one, we would have had to live with the consequences that eating beef was dangerous... so we reluctantly arrived at a consensus on the basis of the evidence that does exist -- a best guess... There were huge economic consequences one way or the other."

In other words, the decision was taken not on the basis of the protection of public health, but the protection of the beef industry. At the inquiry in Canterbury, Professor Almond urged that the worst case assessment of a species barrier of one to one should be assumed. He also said that Professor Collinge was firm in his conviction that his work did not lead to the conclusion that the barrier was one to a thousand.

Other members of SEAC have chosen to live with the consequences of telling the population that beef is safe to eat, rather than living with the economic consequences of declaring that eating beef is dangerous.

Cattle-cull no answer

It was in a desperate attempt to get the EU world ban lifted that the government banned the sale of meat from all cattle over 30 months old and arranged for the slaughter, rendering and incineration of all bovine animals over 30 months old or at the end of their useful lives. 60,000 cattle were destroyed between May and July last year and the total is expected to reach one million in the first year of the programme.

The health and safety not only of consumers but also of the abattoir workers were sacrificed to profit. The danger of contamination that exists in the abattoirs has been graphically exposed by the recent report by Bill Swann. This report, commissioned by the government in 1995, was not published in its original form. Instead the government published it in a highly censured form.

His original report is a damning indictment of the practices that go on inside abattoirs. These practices have implications not only for the cross contamination of BSE, but also of E-coli and salmonella. The drive for increased profits in the abattoirs has resulted in bad practices because of staff shortages. Time after time Dr Swann warns, "There are not enough staff... Staff training is inadequate... Practices deteriorate if line speeds exceed staff capability... Production speeds and practices must not exceed the ability of the plant personnel to produce a clean carcass." and so on

Even the Meat Hygiene Inspectors, who are responsible for the standards of cleanliness in the abattoirs, do not have enough time to do their work. Instead of monitoring the whole production process, which they are responsible for, they often have to stand on the line, cutting out the glands of the animals and making a rapid visual examination which is completely inadequate.

As a result of this, animals are admitted into the abattoir that are covered with faeces and are a source of contamination. Unhygienic practices take place which endanger the health and lives of both the abattoir workers and the consumer. The speed of the line meant that spinal cords -- a source of BSE infection -- are not fully removed from all carcasses. A recent tour of butcher's shops in Birmingham, found examples of the thymus -- one of the most infectious parts of the beef animals -- mixed in with the meat on sale.

Swann said that some of the inspectors have been physically intimidated to "actively encourage them to ignore breaches of regulations." MAFF know all this. In September, when MAFF made unannounced visits to abattoirs they found that 48% of them were not complying with government regulations.

These are the problems which caused the outbreak of E-coli in Scotland which resulted in the deaths of 20 people. The dangers posed by the contamination with the BSE agent are much more long-term, but no less lethal.

Today the extent of the crisis and its ramifications are still being covered-up. Beef is declared free from infection up to the cut-off age of 30 months without any proof. The culling policy is if anything increasing the danger to the environment and to human health. The National Intervention Board which is organising the cull told me that they are not responsible for the handling of any infected material because there isn't any, as all the animals being slaughtered are 30 months and under. Clearly a significant proportion of those animals will be incubating the disease. Workers in the abattoirs are exposed to particular danger of infection.

The remains of one million cattle slaughtered in the cull last year are still awaiting final disposal. By February this year, only 3.8% had been disposed of. There are 265,000 carcasses in 40 cold storage sites around the country, as well as the rendered remains of hundreds of thousands more cattle. They are stored in sheds all over the country, sealed with tamper proof lead seals. At the present rate of disposal it will take till the year 2010 to get rid of the mountain of culled cattle. A new selective cull of a further 100,000 cattle most at risk of contracting BSE has started.

MAFF has admitted it is considering using power stations for disposal. Thirty-five power stations are to be used to incinerate meat and bone meal produced from the rendering process. Powergen and National Power have been conducting experiments in which this material has been subjected to temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees centigrade. Scientists have been amazed to find that even at these extreme temperatures, strands related to the prions remain intact. Their data was passed on to the Environment Agency last October, but they did not publish it.

The government is proposing to incinerate cattle carcasses at 22 sites, some of which are in populated areas. The Independent recently published a map showing the sites around the country where 6,120 infected carcasses were buried in the 1980s. Douglas Hogg, then Minister of Agriculture, admitted in Parliament that no central records were kept about the burials. "To provide a complete record could only be done at disproportionate cost."

A conspiracy against working people

What conclusions flow from my investigations? The claims that beef is safe was never based on scientific fact. The work done by Professor Collinge at the Imperial College Medical School, proves conclusively the connection between BSE and CJD.

For 11 years a conspiracy has been mounted against the people of Britain and the world, the cost of which may yet be measured in the deaths of thousands, if not tens of thousands of people.

All of those whose only aim was to tell the truth have been systematically vilified and subjected to all manner of intimidation.

The most direct victims of BSE -- the families of nvCJD victims -- have been left isolated, starved of resources and most importantly of all, denied honest answers to their questions.

The attempts to conceal this problem have humanity valuable time in elaborating a strategy to combat this terrible disease. Research has been curtailed while millions of people have continued to eat infected material.

My investigations have proved that the knowledge exists to change this situation. But here we come to one of the most decisive aspects of this crisis. What we can see is not simply the workings of one state department or group of individuals or indeed one corrupt government. To defend the profits of the giant agri-businesses and the political hides of the Tory government, the entire machinery of the state, the scientific establishment and the media were mobilised. We are dealing with an entire political system which suppresses the concerns of the vast majority in order to defend the selfish interests of a small minority.

The current efforts by the incoming Labour government to get the ban on British beef lifted confirms this. In my view the radical measures necessary to overcome this crisis are in the final analysis dependent upon changing this set-up.

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