Beef Scares Europe essays

Beef Scares Europe essays The strange disease, called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as BSE, had its origin in 1985, when the first official case of mad-cow disease was detected in Britain. In 1988 Britain ordered the slaughter of all cattle infected with BSE but the British manufacturers continued to export banned animal feed to the Continent. In 1990 a cat with symptoms of BSE was discovered. The British Government was frightened and started to watch for human cases. In 1995, the first person died of a Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the human version of mad-cow disease. Because of this tragic incident the continental Europeans stopped to buy British Beef, British cows and British animal feed in the mid-1990s and thats the reason why many European states felt themselves safe. Nevertheless in the last few weeks the first cases of BSE have been announced in Germany and Spain. In France a panic broke out as well because three supermarkets made public that meat from a dozen cows, which had an infected animal among them, had made its way into the shops. The outcome was that the beef prize dropped down immeasurably. The French public is eating 50 percent less beef than they did a few weeks ago and five neighbour-countries dont import meat from France anymore. The number of victims in Britain has increased to 82 in the last few days. Since last summer also two people in France and one person in Ireland have died from the disease. Doctors say that CJD is a mysterious, incurable illness that attacks the nervous system and destroys the brain and all its functions. Nobody knows when the illness will break out because the human form of the disease can incubate for a decade or more before symptoms appear. Unfortunately there is no cure for it but there are a number of medicaments which can relieve the pain. The bad news is that the number of victims is rising now about 40% because of the long incubation period. ...