London

Britain's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) was accused this week of hindering research into bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) — mad cow disease — during the 1980s.

Maitland Mackie, former chairman of the animals committee of the then Agricultural and Food Research Council, said that MAFF awarded BSE-research grants to scientific “novices” working in its own laboratories, rather than to those in independent institutions with long experience in related areas.

Mackie's comments came shortly before the publication this week of the conclusions of a public inquiry led by Lord Phillips into the BSE outbreak.

The inquiry is expected to distribute blame widely among MAFF officials and their political bosses for giving excessive weight to the interests of the food industry in their handling of information about the spread of BSE and its likely implications for human health.

The Phillips report is also expected to look critically at the impact of cuts to agricultural research in the 1980s, and the efforts by MAFF to exert control over the results that were published.

In evidence to the inquiry, for example, Alan Dickinson, head of the Neuropathogenesis Unit in Edinburgh between 1981 and 1987, had claimed that the overall research funds “were given disproportionately to those without previous experience”, with the result that his own “chronically underfunded” unit had had its work “seriously hindered”.

Speaking this week in a radio interview with the BBC, Mackie argued that MAFF's decision to channel funding to its own institutes had held up vital research into BSE by two years.