The good news among the bad news:

An Irish company, Enfer Scientific, has perfected a test that shows if meat and bone (and potentially blood) are BSE-free within two hours. It will soon be possible to sell BSE-free meat. It may be only a matter of time before the test is extended to live animals, thereby ensuring definitively BSE-free animals.

British scientists are likely soon to develop a test to detect nvCJD prion, the infectious protein causing the brain-wasting disease believed to originate from BSE-contaminated meat. This follows evidence that the rogue protein is found in tonsils.

A `tonsil test' will help eliminate one of the great unknowns, how many in the population carry the prion, and facilitate earlier treatment once a cure is discovered.

Confirmation that a BSE-type prion in sheep, causing scrapie, is transmitted by white blood cells is likely to have a dramatic effect on the way blood products are processed.

But Prof Adriano Aguzzi's finding that the B lymphocyte is necessary for the disease to occur means that eliminating such white cells will be a means of controlling its transmission, and in all probability nvCJD.

The American CJD expert, Dr Paul Brown of the National Institutes of Health, has established that infectious prion agents do not associate with albumen-based blood products such as Amerscam Pulmonate II, albeit with other blood components.

He says that if his finding had been published - and it is only a matter of time before it is - the withdrawal of such products would not have been deemed necessary on public health grounds.