Within weeks of the release of the report by the Phillips inquiry into the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis in the UK, concern about the zoonotic disease is spreading across Europe.

Credit: Photo:AP/John Redman

Several countries have increased efforts to make certain that the general public is not eating BSE-infected meat, and scientists in the UK are recalculating the potential size of the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) epidemic following the death of an elderly man. The British government is also awaiting a “comprehensive assessment” of “BSE-related issues in vaccines” following the revelation that the company, Medeva, distributed a polio vaccine made using bovine material sourced in the UK in the manufacturing process until as recently as September—a practice that was believed to have stopped in 1989.

The Phillips report (http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk/) is the first official document to state that BSE is not scrapie, that it is caused by feeding cattle infected with BSE to other cattle and that it gives rise to CJD in humans. It details the failings of the agricultural and meat-producing communities, and the government bodies responsible for their oversight, that lead to BSE transmission to the human population.

European governments are now taking stock of the bad practices outlined in the report. TheEuropeanCommis-sion is asking for 100,000 cattle in Ireland to be tested for BSE in response to a fresh outbreak of the disease in France where the government has been asked to ban the consumption of cattle born before July 1996. Italy has called for an emergency summit of the European Union's veterinary committee, and Switzerland and Poland have introduced bans on beef consumption and importation. Britain is to test pigs and poultry for BSE contamination.

The Phillips report also reveals that, in the face of a threat to public health, it is particularly difficult to control the distribution of medicines in the UK. The complexity of the licensing system means that ensuring that UK bovine material was not used in the manufacture of medicines would have been an “administrative nightmare,” writes the report. Instead of being subject to new regulation, companies were trusted to comply with guidelines requesting that they use supplies from alternative countries. Even then, the report concludes, “systematic records of the action taken in response to BSE in respect of individual medical products are lacking.” Vaccines manufactured using UK-bovine material were phased out over a 5-year period, ending in 1993.

The report also states that there was a need “to establish all the pathways by which bovine products. . .might come into contact with humans. . .” However, “. . .no coordinated or comprehensive consideration was given to the various routes by which BSE might infect human beings. . .” The lack of interdepartmental cooperation between the Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries and the Department of Health in coordinating the response to the zoonotic threat is also criticized, as is the failure to appoint a research “supremo” to oversee scientific matters related to BSE/CJD.

Until now, the disease—one of four forms of CJD—was characterized by its incidence in a young age group, but the death of a 74-year-old man has pushed predictions of the size of the British CJD epidemic back into the hundreds of thousands of cases.