WHEN the British government announced in 1996 that BSE had passed from cows into people, even the nation’s famously cynical journalists were shocked. When a lone public health expert announced last week that in all likelihood it hadn’t, shock simply didn’t come into it.
True, some, including the relatives of the dead, were hurt and angry. But most people, journalists included, were just plain baffled by the claim that variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) might after all not be the human form of BSE.
It’s not hard to see why. While mainstream BSE researchers swiftly rejected the claim, the paper making it was published in the British…
