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Headline: ADVISER WARNED IN 1989 OF `MAD COW INJECTION RISK TO H

Wire Service: PA (PA News)

Date: Mon, Dec 14, 1998

Copyright 1998 PA News. Copying, storing, redistribution, retransmission,

publication, transfer or commerical exploitation of this information is

expressly forbidden.

By Andy Woodcock, PA News

One of the Government's key advisers on BSE believed as early as 1989

that there was a " moderately high " risk that the disease could be

transmitted from cows to humans, not by eating beef, but via injections,

the inquiry into the problem heard today.

In a private letter to a fellow expert, Professor Sir Southwood

-- whose 1989 report provided the Government with its first scientific

guidance on so-called " mad cow disease " -- said he had anxiety over the

danger of injections " very much in mind " .

At that time, the Government was assuring the public that the risk to

humans from BSE was remote, and had not moved to ban the use of certain

specified bovine offals (SBOs) in pharmaceuticals such as vaccines, many of

which contain cattle products.

Former Conservative Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley told the inquiry

today that she was not aware of Professor Southwood's concerns or of the

existence of the letter.

She told the inquiry counsel Freeman that she was not aware that

the ban on the use of SBOs did not apply to medicines.

The decision to introduce the SBO ban was announced in June 1989, four

months after the publication of the Southwood report and a month before

Professor Southwood's letter to the head of the Tyrell Committee of

research into BSE.

In the letter, Professor Southwood, of Oxford University, wrote:

" Personally, I would have thought the possibility of human infection was

moderately high if some medicinal products were made from tissues of

infected animals and injected into humans.

" That's an extreme case, but we certainly had such anxieties very much

in mind. "

It was not for some time that the SBO ban was extended to cover

pharmaceuticals, and Mrs Bottomley told the inquiry that she could not

recall whether she had known at the time that there were no proposals to

remove medicines produced before the ban from the shelves.

During her time as Secretary of State for Health, between 1992 and 1995,

she said, her understanding was that the best scientific advice was that it

was very unlikely, but not impossible, that humans might be in danger of

infection from BSE.

Although she said she had not read the Southwood Report by the time she

joined the Department as a junior minister in 1989, she said she understood

its message to be that the risk of BSE to humans was " remote or

theoretical " .

She added: " Of course, remote doesn't mean impossible. I think remote is

clear - remote means unlikely but it doesn't mean impossible.

" You would have to be a statistician to say whether or not it means

significant.

" What I had in my mind was that there was no evidence that BSE in

animals leads to CJD in humans, or there was no evidence that eating beef

leads to CJD. "

Mrs Bottomley said that Government policy on BSE was driven by

scientific knowledge.

She told the inquiry that she relied on the recommendations of her

scientific advisers in dealing with a series of health scares during her

term in office, including BSE, cot death, the so-called " flesh-eating bug " ,

meningitis outbreaks and the plague in India.

She said: " I worked very closely with the Chief Medical Officer on

alarming issue after alarming issue and in each case I was aware that this

had the potential to be some horrific new development.

" I would not characterise my position as dismissing scare stories, but

knowing that we had to evaluate the evidence and then share that evidence

as quickly as possible.

" Always, when an anxiety was raised, I would ask the CMO `is this an

issue which has enormous potential on which we must act now, energetically,

or one where we should take another course of action?'.

" I have no recollection of ever personally expressing a view. I would

always have said that the CMO thinks that there is no evidence that BSE

causes CJD -- I don't think my opinion on this subject is worth a lot, I am

not an expert. "

The BSE situation was complicated by the fact that scientific opinion on

the issue was rapidly evolving as more was discovered about the disease,

she said.

" The concept that you base your policy on the science - but the science

itself keeps moving and, above all, you double check it with surveillance

of what is actually happening - that was a comfortable concept for me. "

She said the public tended to have unrealistically high expectations of

the safety of food and called for greater " health literacy " so that people

would be more well equipped to judge the extent of any risks to their

well-being.