by Iain Murray
May 29, 2003

The whole Mad Cow crisis in Britain reveals the folly of precipitate and precautionary action. In the mid-late ‘80s cows were fed meals that included other cow remains (like ground up bone). It appears that this feeding method helped transmit Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a disease that progressively destroyed brain functions in cows. When symptoms first became apparent, infected animals appeared to be behaving erratically, hence “Mad Cow disease” caught on in the popular imagination.

A lot of meat from infected cows entered the human food chain. Cheap meat especially often contained brain and spinal-cord tissue. Initially, scientists believed that BSE and diseases like it could not infect other species, so the humans who had eaten the cheap meat were safe. Then some people started dying horribly of a human spongiform encephalopathy, similar to an already known ailment called Creuzfedlt-Jakob Disease (CJD). Doctors eventually decided that this was a variant of the existing disease because it had slightly different characteristics, and so it became known as vCJD. The method of transmission of this disease is still debated.

In the early 90s, scientists decided that they did not have enough evidence to be as sure as they could be that beef was safe. Stephen Dorrell, as health secretary, therefore announced this to the nation. The reaction was worse than even the Ministry of Agriculture expected. Public confidence in British beef was shattered, and sales plummeted, despite the fact that the practice of feeding cows remains of other cows had ceased. Domestic beef disappeared from menus. Drastic action was decided on to restore public confidence and a program of mass slaughter began aimed at eliminating BSE from the national herd. This cost the government billions. As a colleague of mine when I worked for the British government on rail privatization commented: “We privatized electricity to finance tax cuts. We’re privatizing the railways to pay for a barbecue.”

But the economic disaster was not the only negative consequence. Once the possibility of transmissible vCJD had been established, the modelers got to work. If anyone who had eaten brain-related tissue in the ‘80s was at risk of exposure, then potentially millions could have been exposed to a horrible brain-eating disease for which there was (and still is) no cure. Unsurprisingly, this made headlines. The basic line of thinking among the public about official science was: “They told us we were safe, now they say we’re all going to die in agony. How could they be so wrong? They’re either incompetent or evil.” This attitude is at the root of current British Luddism about GM foods, among other things.

Yet those apocalyptic models were probably just plain wrong. The disease actually appears to affect only people with certain genetic characteristics, which limits susceptibility to only 40 percent of the British population to begin with. There has also been a decline in the number of new cases arising over the past two years, strongly suggesting that the incubation period was about 12 years, and that most people who were infected have already developed the disease.

Therefore, Britain almost destroyed an industry, spent billions, and crippled the reputation of science as an honest profession for the sake of precipitate action against a disease that killed a handful every year. The Mad Cow crisis is a case study in how governments believing the worst as a matter of course and taking action before the full facts are ascertained can bring untold costs to a nation.

Doom-mongers often talk about the precautionary principle—the idea that you should not adopt any new technology unless you are absolutely certain that it is completely safe. It might be better for their credibility if they adopted some precaution before predicting that the latest cause celébre could kill more people than AIDS.

A version of this article was published at National Review Online on May 21, 2003.