Mike4 wrote:A brief ten second report on R4 at lunchtime says a case of BSE has been found on a farm in Ayrshire. Movement restrictions have been put in place around the farm, the outbreak has been isolated and there is no risk to the public.
Yeah right. That's what they said last time too, wasn't it?
Well there's been a couple of cases (something like 7 in the last 20 years) where there's just been one case and that's it, I suspect we're just much more paranoid about testing and finding one-off cases of cows with any kind of neurological problem that would have just been ignored previously.
You can certainly tell when they've got BSE - I've only seen one bad case but it's really distressing to watch, it ended up trying to hurdle a 10' hedge, which didn't end well...
France is the classic case where BSE was strangely completely absent for a long time, which meant they weren't subject to the same trade embargoes as other countries.
Of course now post-Brexit, it's all a mess - consignments from Europe to the UK aren't subject to the same standards at the production site and we're not testing on entry because Remainer blob wokeist
Jacob Rees=Mogg thinks it would be an act of self-harm to do so, but when we do do spot tests, we eg find that
21 out of 22 loads from Romania had illegal meat in them.
It's not just in animals that people try to hide problems - when I worked for The Ministry, one particular country was notorious for not declaring plant diseases that would crop up in our testing.
But at the moment I'd be less worried about BSE and far more worried about bird flu, the US have seen extensive transmission in cattle herds and some crossover to and from humans, but it's being minimised either deliberately or through incompetence.