Politics
Put blame for BSE where it belongs
Published 23 October 2000
Ziauddin Sardarexposes the persistent failures and habitual secrecy of a government ministry
Brace yourself for a public uproar when the Phillips report into the BSE scandal is published in a few days. An unprecedented examination of British public policy-making, the inquiry provides a detailed account of how politicians, civil servants and scientists collaborated to deceive the public and also to fan the flames of the disaster.
The 13-volume report names names. So we can expect contempt directed towards former Tory ministers such as John MacGregor and John Gummer - who force-fed a hamburger to his daughter. Civil servants such as the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food's former chief veterinary officer Keith Meldrum and its permanent secretary Richard Packer, who played an integral part in the scandal, are also likely to be singled out for blame. And the reputations of a string of senior government scientists, who colluded in the sham by solemnly and repeatedly assuring the public that British beef was absolutely safe, are unlikely to be enhanced.
We already know much of what Lord Justice Phillips's report has to say - most of its material has been on the web for months. It is what he cannot provide us with that needs highlighting - a full account of the real culprit of the scandal: Maff, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
Maff is supposed to promote the commercial interests of farmer and food industry, while safeguarding the health and interests of consumers. In practice, consumers' interests hardly figure in Maff's calculations. Throughout the BSE crisis, its "expert advisory committees" were staffed by scientists who were acting as paid consultants to the industries whose products they were allegedly assessing.
From the inception of the disaster, Maff ignored all the warning signs. When the first cases of BSE were detected in cows, independent scientists such as Professor Richard Lacey and Dr Harash Narang warned the government that BSE might be fatal to human consumers. A large majority of Maff's own in-house scientists also rang warning bells. Maff's response was a campaign to malign independent critics and muzzle its own staff. Lacey was forced to take early retirement. Narang was summarily sacked and publicly disgraced.
"Maff carefully selected its advisers," says Stephen Dealler, a consultant microbiologist, who has worked on BSE and CJD since 1988. "Many of them were not experts in the field . . . The committees were asked very specific questions; and certain questions that would elicit unacceptable answers were suppressed."
For example, the Southwood committee, set up in 1988 to investigate the danger to humans and animals from BSE, was concerned that feeding contaminated material to pigs, as well as cattle, might be hazardous. But Maff insisted that "pigs" were outside the committee's remit, and its officials repeatedly misrepresented the absence from the committee's report of any discussion of pigs as "proof" that the committee was confident that pigs posed no risk.
According to Erik Millstone, a leading BSE policy expert: "Maff invested far too little in BSE research, did so far too slowly, and tried to avoid commissioning or facilitating any research which might produce findings that could undermine its policies or its optimistic narrative." Millstone, a senior lecturer at Sussex University's Science Policy Research Unit, says this is "why we still do not know the identity of the BSE pathogen and have no test with which to identify infected but asymptomatic animals and cannot certify any meat as BSE-free, do not know how to eradicate the disease, nor how to deactivate fully contaminated materials".
The Phillips report will also be silent on another important issue: how Maff has been able to undermine comprehensively the new Food Standards Agency (FSA). The FSA was established in April this year, with an explicit remit to protect public health and operate more openly. But with a tenacity that would do credit to Slobodan Milosevic, the guilty men have fought their corner. Maff still retains control of three areas of food safety - pesticides, veterinary medicine and, hold your breath, BSE itself.
A detailed account of how Maff operates is provided by Kirstin Dressel, who has just completed a PhD thesis at Lancaster University. Dressel looked at the social and political reasons that shaped the BSE crisis, and studied the same range of people as Lord Justice Phillips. Her thesis, providing a blow-by-blow account of Maff's campaign of misinformation, will be put on the web this week.
So, where do we stand now? There are 84 known cases of the new variant form of CJD (vCJD), linked to BSE. Victims are gearing up to fight compensation battles in the courts. The whole crisis has cost the Treasury more than £4bn. The reputation and prosperity of an important British industry has been destroyed. And we could still face an epidemic of vCJD as the infectious agent may have spread to other hosts, and may still be in some of the beef we eat. If we are spared a plague of biblical proportions, it will be purely by luck.
Meanwhile, Maff continues its old tricks. Despite official denials, it is conducting secret trials of genetically modified (GM) crops in five British counties. An independent inquiry by the Advisory Committee on Animal Feeding Stuffs has already revealed that alien genes used by scientists to modify crops are surviving the manufacturing process that turns GM crops into animal feed. Large fragments of genetically modified DNA could be entering the food chain. So we could already be on our way to another potential disaster.
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