Even the most dedicated vegetarian cannot avoid cattle products, which enter a vast range of goods from cigarette filters to soap. Tallow made from animal fat is used in everyday objects from carpets to television sets. In general, only between one-third and a half of the animal is eaten. "The real market is in the by-products," said Paola Colombo, an EU Commission official.

Ballanchine Was a Victim
"Cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, Gucci handbags - that's animal waste." People daub their faces with anti-aging creams made from lightly processed bovine materials, an undefined danger indeed, but the choreographer George Ballanchine died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after using a bovine glandular product to preserve his youthful looks.

The first French victim of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was a body-builder who used a muscle-boosting preparation of the kind still sold virtually unregulated in health food stores in the United States.  One contains "freeze dried bovine brain, spleen, pituitary glands and eye tissue," said Michael Hansen, a microbiologist with the U.S. Consumers' Union. "It's almost a cow in a pill."

Questionable cattle products have gone into baby food, pet chow, beauty preparations and vaccines. Only last month, Britain withdrew supplies of polio vaccine after discovering that they were cultivated from British bovine serum produced when mad cow disease was at its height. Eleven million children and travelers have received the oral vaccine. Vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria and whooping cough also were made from British-sourced bovine material until at least 1993.

The government said the risk of contracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from vaccine was "incalculably small," but this is not what was said by the author of the first major British mad cow investigation, Sir Richard Southwood.  He warned in an internal memorandum that the danger of infection from vaccines was "moderately high." He recommended that the removal of bovine material from vaccines should be a priority area for action. If the number of people who have been exposed to and perhaps even infected by prions is unknown and unknowable, the number of people likely to die will become known only with time. The victims will suffer from insomnia, memory loss, depression, anxiety, withdrawal and fearfulness, and eventually loss of coordination, incontinence and blindness. Estimates of eventual deaths from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease range from "several dozen" by the French health secretary, Dominique Gillot, to 250,000 in a recent British government study.

"We might be seeing an epidemic that involves hundreds of thousands of people," said John Collinge of Britain's advisory committee on spongiform encephalopathies. "Let's hope that is not the case, but it's still possible. We need to guard against false optimism and wishful thinking, which has bedeviled this field for too long."

John Kent, a professor of statistics at Leeds University who has tried to quantify the crisis, said that the mathematical models were not to be trusted because scientists do not know how much is an infectious dose and do not know how many people ate infected meat. "Those are two really big variables," he said. "All we can do is to set out a range of possibilities."
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Thanks to Farm Animal Reform Movement for making this article available.
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Friday, 22 December, 2000, 19:37 GMT   BBC News OnlineBSE 'Manslaughter' charge threatens  ministers
French relatives want ministers to stand trial
UK and French ministers could be charged with manslaughter over deaths linked to mad cow disease. Prosecutors in Paris have started preliminary investigations into whether to bring charges, following a lawsuit filed last month by families of two French victims of the brain-wasting human version of BSE, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).

The families want manslaughter charges brought against British officials for allowing the export of suspect animal feed after banning it at home in 1989 - and against French officials for not stopping it.

The panic over BSE has spread across Europe

A preliminary investigation into the French lawsuits is to be led by a Paris judge, Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy, who made her name examining charges against ministers and officials linked to the use of Aids-contaminated blood in transfusions in the 1980s.

The blood scandal, which has drawn comparisons with the mad cow crisis, ended with the trial of three ministers, including former prime minister Laurent Fabius, early last year. He was acquitted.

In October, Lord Phillips' report of the UK BSE inquiry criticised successive government ministers for repeatedly misleading the public about the threat to human health posed by mad cow disease.

'Heavy responsibility'
A UK spokesman pointed out on Friday that the report had decided there was "no criminal case to answer".

But in their writ the French families said that Britain bore a heavy responsibility for "authorising the mass export of animal meal, which they recognise as being the main source of contamination".

Several court cases over mad cow disease have begun in the UK, where more than 80 people have contracted vCJD, but they focus on charges of negligence rather than manslaughter, a charge more difficult to prove.

The French lawsuits deal with the deaths of 27-year-old man in 1996, and a women who died at the age of 36 last February.

More cases of BSE are expected in Germany
  Concern over BSE has sparked consumer panic in France, prompting the government to ban meat and bone meal feed, take T-bone steaks off restaurant menus and institute a sweeping programme of health tests for cattle.

Many schools have banned beef from their cafeterias.

The scare, reminiscent of Britain's mad cow crisis in the mid-1990s, broke out in October after three French supermarket chains removed beef from their shelves over fears it might have come from herds where a contaminated cow was found.

The European Union reacted to the growing anxiety earlier this month by ordering a blanket six-month ban on meat and bone meal in all animal feed, and calling for tests on all cattle older than 30 months from next July.

Unilateral bans
The Paris legal move came as the European Commission threatened to ban some German sausages because of fears they may be contaminated with BSE.

European Food Safety Commissioner David Byrne said: "My overriding concern is that consumers in other EU member states are afforded an equal level of protection as consumers in Germany."

German officials had claimed that the country's cattle were free from BSE - until the first case in a German-born cow was announced on 24 November.

Two new cases of BSE in Germany have now been confirmed, bringing the total to five, and more are now expected.

Several European countries have already slapped unilateral bans on German beef and they were joined on Thursday by Germany's neighbour, Austria - one of the few remaining EU countries to be free of BSE.