If you hear government ministers saying that eating British beef is perfectly safe, they are making a claim which is not borne out by what we know at present. All an honest minister can say is that so far as we know at present , eating today's British beef is unlikely to cause CJD in people but there is a slight risk that it may do so. Anything more definite is not truthful. They have always, they say, acknowledged that BSE might transmit to humans. In the absence of any accurate, reliable or simply truthful information coming from 'the experts', the choice has to be yours'.
Life is a risk and our perception of risk is highly subjective.
Cars kill several thousand people a year but we continue to use them. Smokers know well enough that their habit will probably kill them - yet they continue to smoke. That is a conscious choice which people make after assessing, perhaps not very rationally, what they see as the risks. Since no one knows what the outcome of the BSE epidemic will be, it's hard to offer useful advice. If there is a relationship between the amount of exposure to the infectious agent and the chances of developing CJD, then logic suggests that avoiding further contact with the infectious products may help.