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Anderson: criticized a ‘culture of secrecy’ at MAFF. Credit: PA NEWS

Enthusiasm for public spending cuts and deregulation under Margaret Thatcher's leadership seems to have contributed directly to the BSE crisis, evidence heard by the public inquiry into the handling of the crisis has confirmed. This conclusion backs up a long-held suspicion (see Nature 384, 9; 1996).

Richard Southwood, head of an influential working party set up by the UK government in 1988 to recommend ways of handling the BSE outbreak, told the inquiry, for example, that Derek Andrews, then permanent secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), had told him he hoped the committee's proposals “would not lead to an increase in public expenditure”.

Southwood says the request did not influence the committee's work. But he added that it gave an idea of the political climate at the time. He says: “I'm sure it influenced [the government's handling of the BSE crisis].”

Similarly, David Tyrrell, chairman of the UK government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) until 1995, pointed out to the inquiry that general cutbacks in the veterinary service resulted in a neglect of the BSE problem as a whole and, in particular, that the lack of inspectors hindered enforcement of the feed and specified bovine offal bans.

Government cuts in science also curtailed research on BSE, argued Tyrrell, pointing out that MAFF's Central Veterinary Laboratory in Weybridge was at the time under intense budgetary pressure. And, in 1988, a visiting group had recommended that scrapie research at the Neuropatho-genesis Unit in Edinburgh — itself faced with closure — be discontinued, he said.

Tyrrell added that the director of the UK Institute of Animal Health at Compton had also rejected a recommendation that it stop scrapie research, and that fortunately he decided to start BSE research programmes without waiting for earmarked funds, by transferring money from pig research.

Fred Brown, another member of SEAC, complains that MAFF concentrated BSE research at its Central Veterinary Laboratory, which had little previous experience of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, and “tended to ignore” the more experienced Neuropathogenesis Unit. Roy Anderson, professor of zoology at the University of Oxford and a prominent expert on the epidemiology of BSE (see Nature 383, 209; 1996), told the inquiry that scientific understanding of BSE had been delayed by the reluctance of MAFF to provide outside researchers with access to data — a tendency attributed to a ‘culture of secrecy’ at MAFF, and its failure to dedicate sufficient staff to analysing and distributing data (see Nature 383, 467; 1996).

The BSE crisis emerged at a time when the Conservative government was also keen to deregulate industry. Implicit criticism of this policy came from George Lamming, emeritus professor of biological studies at the University of Nottingham and chair of an expert working group on animal feedstuffs set up in 1991, who told how the government rejected his group's recommendation in 1992 that an independent committee be created to ensure that the feed industry was complying with the ban on feeding animal protein to cattle. Lamming told the inquiry that he was “extremely disappointed” with the government's reaction.

In an internal memo dated 28 July 1993, Brian Dickinson, then head of MAFF's Food Safety Group, wrote that such a group would “add to the pressures for regulation when we are trying to go the other way”, and recommended lobbying the Department of Health, adding that “DH officials have been strongly in favour of the setting up of the committee”.