A catalogue of political mismanagement, poor communications, bureaucratic deception, dithering and scientific ineptitude is set out in the official report on the BSE crisis published yesterday by the British government. Consumers were kept in the dark about the lethal threat to human health involved. The crisis was not confined to the United Kingdom, but spread to affect people all over Europe. It sharply raised consciousness about food safety and put that subject high on the political agenda. In Ireland the consequences have been profound.
All this merits the closest attention to the voluminous report on what is aptly described as a national tragedy in the UK. Eighty people have died so far, with possibly many more thousands of deaths to come. The report exhaustively describes the course of the disease and political and administrative reaction to it. It also includes a substantial and well-founded evaluation of the evidence and an appraisal of how the scientific community responded to it. This says the scientific process was gravely wanting.
There was a failure to react urgently to the likelihood that the disease may have originated in a mutation in cattle or sheep in the early 1970s, arising from intensifying agricultural practices driven by profit maximisation. BSE was only diagnosed in 1986. That long gap is mirrored in the further delay in identifying how extensive was the prevalence of the human form, variant Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease, until the mid1990s. The report finds that while politicians and officials did not lie to the public about BSE, they ignored growing scientific evidence about the threat to public health and became preoccupied with preventing alarm.
It is difficult not to conclude that one of their primary motivations was to protect commercial and agricultural interests. Beef was so potent a symbol of British nationalism that it became the focus of Eurosceptic rejection of intrusion from Brussels. The crushing blow dealt to such an approach when the true extent of the disease among animals became apparent drained credibility away from the government - and from its scientific advisers. It helped to lose the Conservatives the 1997 election as a discredited and exhausted administration.
Ireland escaped such an extended problem because of far more stringent controls and precautionary measures, made necessary because of the beef industry's economic importance. But it is still not known precisely how prevalent BSE is in this country. And it is quite unsatisfactory that many food safety questions remain the responsibility of the Minister of Agriculture and his department, though the setting-up of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland has helped shift the balance and ensured food safety policy is driven primarily by consumer interest.