Sir, - Just when we though it was safe to go back and sink our incisors into a rich succulent slab of beef, along came the BSE furore. Says Kevin Myers (June 20th): "We have been defrauded and cheated, robbed and insulted; it is more than possible that some of us have been poisoned too." Correct. But then: "And the quite wonderful thing about the entire matter is that there are no names.
Actually, if truth be told, the eruption of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease is linked to another form of mad cow disease, Thatcherism. It was Maggie's herd who in their first year of office, ignored a scientific warning about the safety of British beef and then to appease friends in the food processing industry, removed the requirement for high temperature sterilisation. When dead sheep, including those who had died of scrapie, were added to animal feed it was just a matter of time before scrapie mutated into BSE, the degenerative neurological condition that has skipped from branch to branch of the mamalian tree.
BSE, first identified in 1986, was only made public in 1988. Farmers were ordered to destroy cattle, but for two years were only given 50 per cent compensation, with the result that dishonest farmers were selling diseased cattle through lightly supervised markets into the food chain.
Conservative Party denial and neglect has been phenomenal and to even summarise it here would require a letter slightly longer than the Irish Times Weekend Supplement. Suffice it to say that the blame for the Beef Crisis lies at the feet of a species for whom producing bull is second nature. How terrible that an inoffensive slice of roasted bovine's posterior holds the threat of a lingering death a decade or so hence and millions of omnivorous Britons must wait and see who is to be struck down, like involuntary participants in an obscene version of the National Lottery (another ghastly Tory creation which smacks of insanity). - Yours, etc.,
Elm Mount Road,
Beaumont,
Dublin 9.