Those who can remember the 1990s will remember that one of the big news stories of the decade in the UK was the BSE crisis. The outbreak, often referred to as the mad cow disease outbreak, was one of the biggest public health problems in the history of the UK.
Despite it being something that is associated with the 1990s, the mad cow disease crisis actually first started to rear its head in the mid-1980s. It was first identified as being a new disease in 1986 and quickly seemed to spread around UK cattle farms.
The disease BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) is a type of neurodegenerative disease affecting cattle. It causes the brain to become filled with small holes, like a sponge and this is what then leads the cattle to start shaking, have problems standing up and have temperamental issues. It always leads to death.
This is caused by abnormally folded proteins which are known as prions, rather than a type of bacteria or virus – these were not as well researched in the 1980s, however.
The way that this illness made it into the cattle was through the feed. To cut costs, feed made of parts of the cattle that were not used as meat was being put back into the food to make it higher in protein. Unfortunately, this practice was inevitably going to lead to a problem like this and in fact many decades before, Rudolf Steiner the father of biodynamic farming, had warned about the consequences of feeding animal remains to animals.
Inevitably, the crisis continued to escalate through the late 1980s, and although the government continued to insist that British beef was safe to eat, of course that was not actually the case. The first victim of the disease was a cat who when tested after his death was confirmed to have the same disease. This means that it was capable of jumping to a very different species. Many other animals at zoos around the UK also started to develop the illness and in 1996 the government finally announced that in fact it could also be passed to humans in the form of vCJD – variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
Trust in British beef and the meat industry in general rapidly fell after this and this prompted many people to turn towards a meat free diet. With exports of British beef being banned, people started to question other foods and look into ways to eat more healthy and ethically sourced foods, and this included cutting out meat.
Of course, we get a lot of vitamins from meat and children in particular require vitamins to grow, however this is easily resolved by taking supplements like these kids multivitamins vitortho.co.uk/supplements/categories/multivitamins/kids-all-in-1/
Although this crisis did have devastating consequences for the British meat industry as well as for many farmers, it did help to make the public more aware of the food that they are eating and also to look at ways to change to a more healthy and ecologically friendly diet.