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Dominique Dormont, a prion expert who is head of the French government's spongiform encephalopathy advisory committee, is — like many BSE/CJD researchers — dismayed at what he claims are the years lost because of an apparent lack of political support for work using primates.

Dormont says that a proposal for experiments on macaques, submitted in 1996, was not approved because some states — including the United Kingdom — opposed it on animal-welfare grounds.

Large-scale primate experiments can only be carried out at a continental level, says Dormont, because of the high costs and logistics. He says that some countries felt such experiments would be a waste of money, as, by the time their results came through, the results of human exposure to BSE would already be beginning to appear.

Paul Brown, of the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, one of the authors of the PNAS paper (see above), adds that he advocated similar experiments in the United States at roughly the same time. But he claims that government safety restrictions on BSE and vCJD materials have all but halted research.

“I can understand that they don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry working on these agents,” says Brown. “But the regulations are blocking all research in the handful of labs who have forty years experience handling these agents.”

Noëlle Bons, from the University II of Montpellier, another author of the paper, wrote to Edith Cresson, the then European commissioner for research, in 1998, presenting her with the preliminary results of the PNAS paper. She also complained that she had heard nothing regarding a research proposal on BSE she had submitted the previous year. Bons claims that, despite meeting a member of Cresson's staff, she remains in the dark as to support for her project.