Conservatives misjudged risks of BSE
02 November 2000 by AngelaF
The last Conservative Government did not lie to the public about BSE, nor put farmers' interests before consumers'.
This was the conclusion of last week's report into the Government's response to the risk of humans contracting CJD from the cattle disease.
But the report on the £27m, two-and-a-half-year BSE inquiry also found the Government had been mistakenly "preoccupied with preventing an alarmist over-reaction to BSE because it believed that risk was remote."
It also judged that the Government's insistence until 1996 that beef was safe to eat had misled the public when the spread of BSE to other animals since 1990 had raised concerns about its transmissibility to humans.
