MAD COWS AND ENGLISHMEN

EUROPE PANICS OVER POSSIBLY DEADLY BRITISH BEEF

FOR YEARS BRITISH GOVERNMENT OFFIcials have repeated the message: The "mad-cow disease" that has killed thousands of British cattle over the past decade represents no danger to humans. Just last December Prime Minister John Major insisted that there was "no scientific evidence" that the fatal brain infection, called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), could be transmitted through beef products.

The British public was thus doubly stunned last week when a government-appointed scientific commission indicated just the opposite. The commission had discovered a new strain of a deadly disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and suggested that the likely cause for its spread was BSE....

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