One cannot ignore the headline-grabbing story, which emerged on Wednesday October 17th, of the scientists beavering away for years testing the brains of sheep which had been found to be suffering from scrapie, to see if there was any hint of BSE, only to find that the brains were those of cattle which had been suffering from BSE. What a waste of time and money, but also what an escape. Had the findings been that there were indications of BSE (which seems likely considering what they were testing!), and the transposition not been discovered, then, the experts suggest, every sheep in the country would have been under sentence of slaughter.
The litany of errors gets worse. The Government's Chief Veterinary Officer admitted on television on Monday 21st October, just as Consumer News was going to press, that a number of errors had been made. One error, which would be hilarious if the consequences had not been so potentially serious, was that it seems that a check test was carried out to make sure that the brains the scientists were using were from sheep. The check test was, however, carried out on different brains which were probably from sheep, but not the same sheep (which were cows anyway).
In all this the Food Standards Agency has been commendably restrained and the newspapers predictably scornful. The FSA did not commission the research and was, I think, unhappy about it before it was revealed as flawed. It has been careful to keep at arm's length from it. It is important to remember that there never has been any evidence of BSE in sheep but the Agency is in a difficult position because, as Sir John Krebs, the FSA Chairman, has said, there is a theoretical possibility that BSE could cross over species. They must therefore acknowledge this.
The newspapers have made it sound very suspicious that the news was first presented, we are told, on the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs website late on Wednesday night. It is probably not suspicious at all and maybe the DEFRA people had no inkling of the opportunity they were giving to the media for the sarcastic headlines and pictures the news would bring.
Of course there could be another scenario altogether. The experiments were carried out on the correct sheeps' brains, which is not too much of a flight of fancy considering the improbability of what actually occurred. A connection with BSE was established. The consequences of this, the slaughter of every sheep in Britain, is far too horrendous and politically disastrous to face, so the research is rubbished.
Would they, could they do that to us? Of course not!
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