LONDON --I am stunned at the awfulness of being British at the moment. A report written by Lord Phillips into the BSE tragedy has just been published. Though it does not roar with horror or screech with condemnation, its quiet steady tone fills me with anger and horror at Britain's farming, veterinary and government processes. The complete evasion of responsibility, the complete inability to think outside one's own tiny patch, has dumped the British beef industry and the 85 known victims of BSE-related disease into a world of trouble.
For what emerges from the painstaking pages of the 16 volumes of the Phillips report is that there is no one person, no one practice, no one "villain or scapegoat" for, in Phillips words, this "peculiarly British disaster." Rather, this horribly unnatural disease that has cut British dairy herds from 63,000 to 33,400 in 10 years, and so far killed 80 people under 55 years of age, has flourished in Britain's culture of government fear and secrecy, and the food and farming industries' greed and contempt for quality.
The history of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, had such a tiny, blameless beginning. Sometime in the early 1970s, one cow in a British herd produced a mutated gene -- this is quite common; this gene was responsible for brain protein. The cow was slaughtered and ground up and sold to the animal-food industry. This was in Britain, and in all countries with industrialized agricultures, standard practice. The animal feed was fed back to cows. The cows ate their own, rendered into dried pellets. Thousands of miniscule fragments of the original cow with a mutated gene were eaten by other cows, which then developed BSE.