Many people claim that they want less government. In the case of Great Britain's problems with "mad cow disease" this is exactly what they got. Yet few people can be pleased. On March 20, 1996, the United Kingdom Health Minister announced that ten relatively young people had died of a very rare brain disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), that generally attacks only a very few elderly people. The minister reported that "the most likely explanation at present is that these cases are linked to exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease (Bonte-Friedheim A10). This is tragic and alarming but it is also outrageous. BSE has been a serious problem for Britain for a long time yet "for a decade [the Conservative government] has dismissed concerns raised by some scientists that humans could contract the disease by eating the meat of diseased animals" (Bonte-Friedheim A10). These cases of CJD probably resulted from meat eaten prior to knowledge of the disease connection but the government has done little since the connection was suspected.
BSE was identified in 1986 and by 1990 "the fear that eating beef could lead to dementia and death had Britain in an uproar" (Reeve 1). BSE was epidemic in British cattle but no one was sure that there could be any effect on human beings (Reeve 1). It was believed that the disease developed in cows as the result of feeding them feed enriched with reduced sheep parts. Sheep can contract a disease known as scrapie, which is a member of the group of brain-destroying diseases to which BSE and CJD belong. The source of the diseases was not known but it was believed that they could not cross from one species to another (Reeve 2). The Economist said in 1990, "the best reason for thinking that BSE will not infect humans is that scrapie never has" ("Looking" 69). This was not a very good reason to believe that there would be no effect on humans -- but this was something th...