The report says they did not act quickly enough when evidence started to emerge that humans were being infected. The 16-volume report follows a 27 million inquiry that has spanned the past two and a half years. It focuses on government failures to enforce abattoir controls which were designed to ensure that any potentially BSE-infected beef was removed from the food chain.
Many questions still remain.
The disease is in the human population and we need to take steps now to prevent its spread. Clinical signs of BSE were first detected in 1985 and the disease was officially recognised in 1986. Almost from the outset there were fears, expressed loudly in the media, of a threat to human health. Despite the government controls, recorded cases of BSE rose through the 1990s, reaching 100,000 in July 1993. Between November 1986 and November 1985, a total of 154,592 cases were confirmed on 32,906 UK farms.