Mad Cow Disease: The Cattle Were Fed Cattle, And The Public Was Fed Reassurance

The first vet on record to see mad cow disease blamed the cattle feed. He was looking for the wrong poison in the right bag, and the British state took three and a half years to reach the same bag.

On 22 December 1984 David Bee, a vet in West Sussex, was called out to Pitsham Farm near Midhurst to look at one of Peter Stent’s dairy cows. She was cow 133. Her back was arched and she was losing weight.

Over the next seven weeks she developed a tremor in her head, and her legs stopped taking instructions. She died on 11 February 1985. By the end of April five more of Stent’s cows were dead.

The rest of the herd described the disease better than any textbook yet could. Cows turned aggressive and became hard to milk. They walked as though the floor had shifted under them. Bee kept going back.

In September 1985 another Pitsham cow went for slaughter, and her brain went to the Central Veterinary Laboratory at Weybridge in Surrey. The pathologist on duty, Carol Richardson, put the tissue under the microscope and wrote spongiform encephalopathy on her report. The changes, she thought, suggested a toxin of some kind.

Bee thought so too. He was convinced something in the feed was poisoning the herd, and he went looking for a fungal toxin in it.

He had the right bag. Whatever was killing those cows had gone into that feed as an ingredient, bought and paid for.

The ministry found a new disease and kept it quiet

Pitsham was not the only farm. In Kent another vet had been called to a herd at Plurenden Manor Farm with cows going the same way. In December 1986 pathologists at Weybridge, working on brains from that herd, recognised what they were looking at.

It was a disease nobody had described before. It belonged to the same family as scrapie, the brain disease British sheep had carried since at least the eighteenth century, and it was in cattle.

Before the month was out, the laboratory’s own notes were already asking what this might mean for the export trade, and for people.

Then the Ministry of Agriculture kept it to itself. Even inside the State Veterinary Service, the government’s own vets, the early cases had been given no publicity at all. For the first half of 1987 an embargo on information about the disease held up the work of finding out how far it had already spread. When the public inquiry reached that embargo, thirteen years later, its judgement was short: it should never have happened.

The scientists named the disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE for short. Everyone else called it mad cow disease, which was easier to say on the bus.

A dairy calf in 1985 was eating other cattle

A dairy farm makes its money from milk, so its calves don’t get much of it. They come off their mothers within days and are reared on a bucket and a bag. In 1980s Britain the bag carried a protein supplement made partly from the calf’s own species.

Meat and bone meal is what a rendering plant makes from the parts of a carcase nobody wants to eat. Offal, bones and condemned meat from the abattoir go in, along with the farm animals that die before they ever get there. Cattle offal went in, brains and spinal cords included, and so did sheep. The lot is cooked, the fat is run off and sold as tallow, and what is left is dried and ground into powder.

British farm animals had been eating it since at least 1926, when the law first recognised it as a feedingstuff. By the mid-1980s it was going into cattle rations at up to 7% of the dry matter, on dairy farms pushing for every extra litre. It was cheap enough that, once it was banned from all farm feed, the Meat and Livestock Commission reckoned Britain’s pig farmers alone were paying £14m a year more for the protein that replaced it.

On a dairy farm the stuff went where the growth was. Feeds containing it were routinely given to dairy calves in their first six months of life, which is when most of the cattle that went on to develop BSE were infected.

It was all done in the open. Rendering is the old principle of using the whole animal, which this site preaches without apology: the suet becomes tallow, the trim becomes mince, the bones go in the stockpot. The renderer was doing the same thing on an industrial scale, and selling the protein back to the farm.

The principle has one flaw. Somebody has to decide what the thing you aren’t wasting gets fed to, and in Britain, for decades, the answer included cattle.

The calves on their mothers mostly escaped it

British cattle did become a danger to the people who ate them, and 178 of those people died. A site that argues the cow is the best friend this wet island ever had owes that a straight look, and then two questions. Which cattle, and what were they eating?

The answer is in the epidemiology, and it is not subtle.

Britain had two kinds of cattle herd. In a dairy herd the calves were reared on milk substitute and calf feed, and the calf feed commonly carried meat and bone meal. In a beef suckler herd the calf stays with its mother, drinks her milk, and moves on to grass, hay, silage and some cereal. Feeds with meat and bone meal in them were rarely given to suckler calves.

Take only the herds whose cases had all been born on the farm, so that nobody’s bought-in calves muddy the picture. On that count, the proportion of dairy herds that got BSE was about 50 times the proportion of suckler herds.

By October 1997, 60% of the dairy herds in Great Britain had recorded at least one case. For beef suckler herds the figure was 16%.

Then comes the giveaway. About 85% of the cases that did turn up in suckler herds were animals the farmer had bought in, and a high proportion of those were crossbred calves born on dairy farms. They were half beef by breeding and dairy by upbringing, and the upbringing is what they had in common with every other case.

The suckler herd had its cases, and most of them arrived in a trailer from a dairy farm.

This site’s case for the ruminant rests on a single trade. The cow eats what people cannot, grass and wet hillside, and hands back meat, milk and butter. BSE is the one time that trade was run backwards. The cow was handed something people would never eat, made out of other cattle, and she handed back a brain disease.

That page is right about the rumen. It saturates the polyunsaturated fat in grass, and in a grain ration too, before it reaches the meat. Nothing on it claims a rumen can make a cow safe to feed to another cow, and the evidence is that it couldn’t. Cattle were infected through the mouth by traces of infected tissue so small that the officials writing the rules assumed they could be ignored.

So the hardest case against the ruminant turns out to be a case about a feed bag. The cattle that lived closest to the life that page describes, on their mothers and then on grass, were the ones the epidemic largely passed by. The cattle that caught it were the ones being reared like a factory input, and the ingredient that killed them was each other.

The feed trade was given an inch

By the end of 1987 the ministry’s epidemiologists had pinned the outbreak on meat and bone meal. On 14 June 1988 the government announced that protein from ruminants could no longer be fed to ruminants, with the ban to start on 18 July.

The feed trade was given those five weeks to clear its existing stock. Some of it, in the inquiry’s dry phrase, “being given an inch, felt free to take a yard”, and went on selling the old feed after the ban had come in, and farmers fed out what they had already bought. Thousands of cattle were infected that way.

Where the ban was obeyed it worked fast. The inquiry found it cut the rate of new infection by 80% more or less overnight. The other 20% is where the story drags on for years.

More than 44,000 British cattle born after the ban went on to develop BSE.

The meat and bone meal was still being made. It was banned from cattle feed and perfectly legal in pig and poultry feed, which came out of the same feed mills as cattle feed. Officials assumed any cross-contamination would be too small to matter.

Later experiments showed a cow could be infected by eating a piece of infected tissue no bigger than a peppercorn. Because BSE takes around five years to show itself, the scale of what was going on in the mills wasn’t understood until 1994.

From November 1989, brains and spinal cords were judged too dangerous for a sausage, but they stayed legal in pig and chicken feed until September 1990. When that ban came in, the inquiry found it could not be enforced and was widely ignored. Meat and bone meal itself stayed in British pig and chicken feed until the spring of 1996. The inquiry’s verdict on the animal feed industry was that it came out of the whole story with no credit.

What British cattle could no longer eat, the rest of the world could still buy. In 1988 Britain sent 12,553 tonnes of meat and bone meal to other European Community countries. In 1989, the first full year in which its own cattle were protected from it, the figure was 25,500 tonnes, and France took more than 16,000 tonnes of that.

In June 1989 the Chief Veterinary Officer, Keith Meldrum, set out the government’s position in a letter to the president of the British Cattle Veterinary Association: “We do not consider it morally indefensible to export meat-and-bone meal to other countries.” It is the kind of sentence that gets written when the cattle in question belong to somebody else.

Shipments carried on to Asia, Africa and the Middle East well into the 1990s.

A parliamentary answer later put Britain’s exports of meals and pellets made from meat and offal unfit for human consumption, between 1988 and 1996, at more than 210,000 tonnes. Two thirds of it went outside the European Community.

Exports of mammalian meat and bone meal from Britain stopped on 27 March 1996, when the European Commission stopped them. A French Senate inquiry later named those perfectly legal exports as the main way BSE reached France.

A committee called it remote, and a minister called it delicious

In February 1989 a working party chaired by Sir Richard Southwood, an Oxford zoologist, reported to ministers on whether BSE could harm people. Its view, as the inquiry later summed it up, was that the risk of it passing to humans was remote and that it was most unlikely to have any implications for human health. Cattle would probably turn out to be a dead end for the disease.

The report also said, in plain words, that if that judgement turned out to be wrong the consequences would be “extremely serious”. The inquiry found that nobody carried that part forward. The reassurance travelled. The warning stayed in the report.

Southwood himself said years later that the ministry had been too optimistic, and too soft on industry.

In November 1989 the brains, spinal cords, spleens, thymus glands, tonsils and intestines of cattle over six months old were banned from human food in England and Wales, with Scotland following in January. Why those tissues are kept out of the food chain to this day is set out in what each organ actually gives you. Until that week, every one of them had been legal in British food.

Six months later came the cat.

On 10 May 1990 it was reported that a Siamese cat called Max had died in Bristol of a spongiform encephalopathy, the first ever found in a domestic cat. Its owner said it had been fed on beef. The papers went to town, and councils started taking beef off the school dinner menu. Humberside was one of the first. Within a week twenty local authorities had banned it from their schools.

The people now deciding what Britain’s children ate for lunch were sitting in council offices, and they had read the papers.

On 16 May the Minister of Agriculture, John Gummer, took his four-year-old daughter Cordelia to a boat show in Suffolk and offered her a beefburger in front of the cameras. Cordelia was reluctant. Her father took a large bite himself, a technique usually reserved for broccoli, and pronounced it “absolutely delicious”.

Five days later he stood up in the Commons and repeated the words of the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Donald Acheson: “beef can be eaten safely by everyone, both adults and children”. Earlier in the same debate, Labour’s agriculture spokesman, David Clark, had mocked him for trying, and failing, to feed his daughter hamburgers. Gummer also told the House there was no evidence of any link between the sick cats and BSE.

At the end of the month France banned British beef. It lifted the ban within a fortnight, after a meeting of European farm ministers. The photograph of the minister and the burger has outlived it by more than thirty years.

Gummer has said since that he was ready for his family to eat it because he believed it was safe, and nothing in the record suggests otherwise. That was the trouble. The confidence was sincere, and it was wrong.

Nine of the first ten were sent to a psychiatrist

Stephen Churchill grew up in Stockton-on-Tees and moved to Devizes, in Wiltshire, at 12, when his father, David, was promoted in the fire brigade. He wanted to join the Royal Air Force and had already sat its tests.

When he was 17, after his grandfather died, Stephen became depressed. His parents took him to the GP, who sent him to a psychiatrist. On 1 January 1995 he was admitted to a psychiatric unit. Three weeks later he was referred to a neurologist. He died in May 1995, aged 19, the first person known to have died of what would be called variant CJD. His death was first recorded as natural causes.

His mother, Dot, said later: “No-one had thought it could get into humans.”

Peter Hall was 20, a first-year environmental studies student at Sunderland University. From early 1995 he began to neglect himself. His doctors suspected student depression and tried him on three different antidepressants. By July he was in a wheelchair. He was buried at Chester-le-Street in February 1996.

When the first ten cases were written up in The Lancet in April 1996, nine had started with changes in behaviour and been referred to a psychiatrist. The disease arrived looking like a young person having a bad year.

On 20 March 1996 the Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, told the Commons about ten cases of CJD in people under 42. He said there remained “no scientific proof that bovine spongiform encephalopathy can be transmitted to man by beef”. In the same breath he told the House that the government’s own Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee had concluded the most likely explanation was that the ten had been exposed to BSE before the offal ban of 1989.

The committee’s own explanation, in other words, pointed at the tissues the 1989 ban had taken out of food.

The same afternoon the Minister of Agriculture, Douglas Hogg, announced two measures. Carcases from cattle over 30 months old would have to be deboned in licensed plants, and mammalian meat and bone meal would be banned from the feed of every farm animal. Then he told the House that “the Government believe that British beef can be eaten with confidence”.

A week later, on 27 March, the European Commission banned Britain from exporting beef, live cattle and meat and bone meal anywhere in the world.

The toll from variant CJD in Britain stands at 178, all of them dead. The worst year was 2000, with 28 deaths. The last was in 2016.

The state decided what Britain could eat, in both directions

In December 1995, three months before Dorrell’s statement, the government had already banned mechanically recovered meat stripped from the backbones of cattle. Inspectors had found spinal cord still attached to carcases in abattoirs.

After March 1996 the deciding came thick and fast, and nearly all of it ran the opposite way to everything said before.

From the spring of 1996, no meat from a British animal over 30 months old could be sold for food. Older cattle were slaughtered, their carcases destroyed, and their owners paid compensation by the kilo. By the autumn of 2000, 4.5 million animals had gone through the scheme, and by April 2003 it had cost more than £3.2bn. The farmers who got through it watched cows they had bred and reared for years go off to be destroyed.

That rule kept older beef off British plates for nine and a half years. It was lifted on 7 November 2005 and replaced with testing. This site thinks the older animal is the better eating, so the next fact makes strange reading: for most of a decade the law kept almost every British cow past the age of two and a half out of the kitchen.

There was one exception, and it is the most honest document the Ministry of Agriculture produced in the whole affair. From September 1996, beef from cattle up to 42 months old could be sold if it came from a herd in the Beef Assurance Scheme. To get in, a herd had to be all beef. It could have no dairy animals on the holding for seven years, no history of BSE, and no feed containing meat and bone meal for seven years.

Not quite twelve years after cow 133, that was the government’s own answer to the question this piece started with. The cattle it trusted were the ones kept away from the dairy and away from the bag.

The deciding went on past the animal and onto the butcher’s block. In December 1997 beef on the bone was banned outright, for two years. The ban took the rib of beef and the T-bone off every counter in the country and gave the House of Lords one of its better afternoons. The guide to British beef cuts has it, dog and all.

The European export ban lasted ten years. A trickle of deboned beef was let out from 1999 under conditions so tight that hardly any went, and normal exports only resumed in May 2006.

Whitehall had decided what Britain ate before. For fourteen years from 1940 the state was the only buyer of meat in the country. What was new in the 1990s was the speed of the reversal. In 1990 the ministry told the Commons that beef was safe for children. By 1997 the same ministry had made it an offence to sell a T-bone. Both times it spoke with complete certainty, and the certainty was the one thing that never changed.

The inquiry found that nobody had lied

The public inquiry, chaired by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, reported on 26 October 2000.

It cleared ministers of lying and convicted them of reassuring. They had genuinely believed the danger to people was remote. They had worked so hard to stop the public panicking that the reassurance became the policy. The inquiry called that a mistake, and found that when Dorrell stood up in March 1996, people felt betrayed.

It also took apart the explanation that had stood for more than a decade. The working theory since the late 1980s had been sheep: scrapie had got into cattle feed after the rendering plants changed their methods in the early 1980s and stopped killing the agent. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization was still publishing that account in 1998.

Phillips threw it out. The cases found between 1986 and 1988, he concluded, came from cattle infected with BSE itself being recycled through the feed, and scrapie had nothing to do with them. BSE had probably begun in the early 1970s from a new source, possibly a cow, or some other animal, with a mutated gene. From then on it had passed from cattle to cattle through meat and bone meal. The rendering theory had no validity, the inquiry said, and rendering had never been able to destroy the agent completely anyway.

That left the blame on the practice itself: cattle fed to cattle, for decades, with nobody asking whether that was wise.

It came out of a cow

Nobody will ever know which animal it was. Whatever it was, it died, and its remains went where the remains of British farm animals went in the 1970s, to the renderer and from there into feed. After more than a decade of quiet recycling, the disease had built up in the national herd to the point where a vet in Sussex was called out to cow 133.

Britain went on to record more than 180,000 cases of BSE, with the peak of 37,280 in 1992. The calves that grew up on their mothers and on grass caught it at a fraction of the rate of the calves reared on the bucket and the bag, and in 1996 the Ministry of Agriculture wrote that into law.

David Bee went looking for a poison in the Pitsham feed in 1985. The inquiry found it there fifteen years later. It had been in the bag all along, and it had come out of a cow.