Public panicked over BSE, claims ex-minister Dorrell

01 December 1998

Public panicked over BSE, claims ex-minister Dorrell

By FWi staff

THE public were to blame for the panic over BSE, fomer health secretary Stephen Dorrell told the BSE Inquiry yesterday (Monday).

He blamed consumers for any misunderstanding over the safety of British beef – they thought that the words “beef is safe” meant the same as “BSE is not transmissible to humans”, he said.

Mr Dorrell, health secretary between July 1995 and May, also blamed slaughterhouses for undermining public confidence in beef by lackadaisical practices. He said that abattoirs had ignored instructions by ministers.

The former health secretary was asked whether the Government should not have given more explicit instructions to abattoirs to ensure beef was not contaminated. He insisted that the Government had taken sufficient steps.

Earlier in the day, Mr Dorrell had described Creutzfeld-Jakob disease – the human form of BSE – as “the worst form of death”.

“What we are talking about is a terrible disease, an untreatable disease,” Mr Dorrell told the inquiry.

“It is very hard to imagine a worse form of death than CJD.”

In March 1996, Mr Dorrell became the first minister to admit a possible risk that humans could catch Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease by eating BSE-infected beef.

The statement rocked the beef industry and within hours beef exports from Britain were banned.