The article below comes from the Guardian OnLine On-Line. I thought it may be of interest to those of you who believe there is
more to the BSE issue than has so far been admited by the government or the meat industry.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scrapie is innocent, OK!Evidence from a forlorn group of cattle on a ranch in mid-west America looks set to upturn the comfortable orthodoxy that
the sheep disease scrapie is the cause of BSE, the line promoted by Britain's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. In
fracturing this link, writes Susan Watts of BBC Newsnight, the US experiment upsets the cosy notion that the risk to people
from BSE is small. MAFF has maintained for years that because we have lived with scrapie for centuries, with no obvious ill
effects, we have little to fear from BSE. But if scrapie is not the cause of BSE, this comforting parallel no longer exists.There is now mounting evidence to suggest that BSE should be considered a new and distinct spongiform disease, separate
from scrapie, and with a pathogenesis of its own. An increasing number of the scientists working in this field believe BSE
could have been a cattle disease all along, cropping up only rarely, but often enough to allow the infectious agent to find its
way into cattle feed when the rendering industry changed its practices in the early 1980s and opened up a route. Once into
cattle feed, the agent would have gone straight into the now infamous circle that saw cattle remains fed to cattle - an ideal way
to amplify the effect of any low-level disease. The agent would not even have had to cross the natural barrier between one
species and another.The logic of a cattle origin for BSE is persuasive - even the government's chief scientific advisor on BSE, John Pattison,
concedes that a cattle origin is now more likely than an explanation that relies on the disease jumping to cattle from sheep.But does it really matter where BSE came from? Well, yes, say scientists. As a first principle with any new disease, the aim is
to establish the disease's origin. In the case of BSE, however, Newsnight has learned that MAFF officials were desperate to
latch on to scrapie because this link provided the most comforting explanation. MAFF could then issue assurances that the
public was at no risk from BSE. The trouble is that this focus affected the practical measures the government relied on to
protect both animal and human health."There was an over emphasis on the scrapie situation - a tendency to think this was just a manifestation of our old friend
scrapie, whereas in fact the BSE epidemic could just as likely have arisen in cattle themselves, and certainly we were dealing
with something quite new," one scientist told Newsnight. "There was a lot of complacency, and if the emphasis had been
more on cattle themselves then we would have seen the full force of the regulations on the control of specified bovine offal
implemented much earlier, and we would have seen much more rigorous policing of the abattoirs and rendering houses than
we saw in the early 1990s."And if we still understand so little about the origin of BSE, how confident can we be about eradicating the disease? One
scrapie researcher told Newsnight that scientists really understand very little about the way these diseases are transmitted in
the field - or why they persist in the environment for so long. "These two things combined," he said, "mean there is a very
serious threat to any attempt to eradicate BSE quickly." He added: "One could only really be certain with present knowledge
that a farm was really free of BSE if it had no case of the disease for many years."And how does British science rank in helping to fill the gaps in our knowledge of scrapie and BSE? In researching this film, it
has emerged that British scientists applied for funding as long ago as the 1970s, and again only four years ago to do the very
same experiment now being done in the US. Both times, their applications were turned down. Ironic then that some of the
most illuminating research on both the origin of BSE and its possible means of transmission should be taking place in the US
where they don't even have a problem with the disease.
None.