Public Knowledge, Private Fears

Abstract

Scholarship and the events of the real world seldom march handin-hand, but, remarkably, an exception happened in the case of this book. It was published in 1996, at the height of what we may reasonably refer to as 'BSE-II', the second and more stunning upheaval in British health and safety policy occasioned by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), popularly known as 'mad cow disease'. On 20 May 1996, scientists advising the British government publicly confirmed that ten new cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a human illness marked by rapid brain degeneration and death, had been definitively linked to BSE, a comparable disease of cattle first observed in British herds ten years earlier. The announcement led to a European ban on the import of British beef and beef products, calls for the wholesale slaughter of contaminated herds, and a drastic drop in the consumption of beef in many parts of Europe. Government policies for disclosing or, more precisely, failing to disclose risk information to the public were squarely blamed for the breakdown in consumer confidence. Coincidentally, the editors, Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, chose the first BSE crisis, triggered by the regulation of cattle feed and specified bovine offals in 1988 and 1989, to help frame the research reported on in this volume. Although none of the contributions actually deals with BSE-I or its aftermath, the case provides a backdrop for themes that Irwin and Wynne rightly see as central to