Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Mad Cow Disease??

The matter wasn't exaggerated since clear guide-lines exist how countries have to react when animals are infected. This shall prevent the further spread of diseases. If for example cases of swine-fever are found in a region, the herds are slaughtered, whether this is hard for the farmers or not. Neither is this a stupid scheme of the European Community but standard in most developed countries. In the case of other diseases, the measures would have been harder and more consequent than the measures taken by Great Britian to fight BSE. The problem with BSE was that the british government stated at the beginning that absolutely no risk of catching BSE from eating meat of infected animals existed and stalled actions against this disease. But probably BSE can be transfered from animals to humans and the EC took measures once the experts had gathered enough evidence to cast sufficient doubts on the british point of view. Then the british government took more consequent actions and eliminated the dangers which are highly suspected to be the source of the human infection. This led to the lifting of the ban on the argumentation that no evidence existed that the disease could be spread under the current standards, not on the argumentation that it had been proven that the disease couldn't be spread anymore. The problem is that nobody knows enough of the disease and the mechanisms of the transfer to answer the later question. It might well be that the chances of getting BSE from british beef are lower than being hit by lightning but nobody knows for sure. But since this was also stated at the beginning of the affair for all the parts of the animal which are now considered to be unsafe, I personally would prefer more research before I trust the statement. As for the British beef being safer than others, the problem being at least as bad in other countries as in Great Britain and the alleged evidence that everyone else covered the problem up while Great Britain took steps, I want to say just one thing: The cows in other countries did not to stagger around as if they were drunk. It is rather typical for the british management of the crises that it isn't even accepted as a problem but rather seen as a scheme to hurt the british farmers. This doesn't increase my trust that all steps were taken to get rid of the risk instead of doing just enough to get the British beef on the European market again.