BSE Crisis Research Articles

Vegetable proteins and milk puddings

In recent years, interest in animal free foods has increased tremendously due to factors like BSE crisis, rise of nutritionally dependent illnesses, like diabetes type II, cardiovascular and digestive diseases, along with ethic orientations of denying animal intakes of any kind. The use of proteins from leguminous seeds as an alternative to the animal proteins in dairy desserts was studied. Lupin, pea and soya protein isolates were used in combination with κ-carrageenan, gellan and xanthan gum, in order to obtain a synergistic effect. Milk puddings were also produced for comparison. Texture studies suggested that mixed protein–polysaccharide systems, with vegetable proteins and κ-carrageenan or gellan gum, would be good systems to develop vegetable gelled desserts. Rheological oscillatory measurements were carried out to clarify the kinetics of gelation and characterise the microstructure of the best performing products. Results from time sweep tests showed that formulations with gellan gum present an industrial advantage over formulations with κ-carrageenan, since the maturation time for gellan gels is of the order of 5–10 h compared with 4–6 days in the case of κ-carrageenan. All the mixed gels presented the typical weak gel structure; therefore, it was possible to perform steady-state measurements, which allowed the observation of a shear-thinning behaviour for all gels.

Could measuring of perceived risk among general practitioners have helped anticipate the French BSE crisis?

In October of 2000, a second BSE crisis caught French public authorities unprepared and caused a collapse in beef consumption as well as considerable political turmoil. Data collected between May and July, 2000, among a group of general practitioners (GPs), while national consumption of beef was back to pre-BSE levels, paradoxically showed high latent risk perception, suggesting a new crisis was possible or likely.

Die europäische Agrarpolitik vor dem Hintergrund der Osterweiterung

Abstract Reimar von Alvensleben asks in his article whether the “Agrarwende” in Germany could be a model for Europe. He argues that the new agricultural policy (the so-called “Agrarwende”), which has been proclaimed and implemented after the German BSE crisis 2000/2001, adds new problems to the already existing problems of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The strategy of improving international competitiveness of German agriculture by promoting the niche markets for organic food, animal-friendly produced food and regional food is unrealistic and thus neglecting the problem of improving the competitiveness of 85−90% of German agriculture. The criterion of ecological efficiency (How to achieve ecological goals at lowest costs?) is totally neglected in agricultural environmental policy. The strategy of implementing environmental and animal welfare standards by the market mechanism will not lead to reasonable results because of perception distortions of the consumers. As a consequence of distorted perception of food risks by politicians, cost of risk prevention are too high and/or safety and health standards in other less spectaculous areas are too low. For these reasons he concludes that the “Agrarwende” in Germany cannot be regarded as a model for Europe, especially not for Eastern Europe. Bernhard Brümmer and Ulrich Koester write in their paper that the Eastern Enlargement of the EU will have significant implications for governance of the CAP. The evolution of the CAP has led to a permanent increase in the intensity of regulation, although the rate of external protection has declined. Past experience - mainly revealed by the European Court of Auditors - has evidenced many irregularities and even fraud as a by-product of the CAP. Governance problems are due to badly designed policies, which demand control of even individual farms and give the member countries, administrative regions (which are supposed to implement the policies on the local scale) and the individual farms themselves incentives to breach the rules. In their view governance problems will certainly increase in the enlarged EU. The new member countries have a weaker administrative capacity and are subject to more corruption than the present EU countries. Adequate policy reaction should lead to fundamental changes of the CAP. Klaus Frohberg argues that in its Mid Term Review the EU-commission proposes a change in the most important instruments of the CAP. Direct payments and intervention prices belong to this group. In his paper the impact of these changes is discussed. Direct payments shall become decoupled from production and be summarised into a single payment to farmers. In addition, the right of these transfers shall be made tradable independent of a simultaneous exchange of land. With regard to the intervention prices they shall be reduced as to approach world market levels. Assuming that the Member States will confirm the proposals the CAP is expected to improve considerably. Allocation and transfer efficiency will increase, consumer welfare will go slightly up, taxpayers will be little if at all affected and the EU can defend its position in the negotiations of the ongoing WTO round. These advantages accrue to the current as well as to the new Member States. In spite of the improvements the CAP still needs to be enhanced in some areas such as the market organisation of sugar and milk.

A Note on Modeling Consumer Reactions to a Crisis: The Case of the Mad Cow Disease

What drives the behavior of consumers when faced with a product-related crisis, such as that involving food contamination or live-threatening design flaws? For both consumers and companies, these crises have become of increasing importance because of the globalization of markets and an increased coverage by the media. Marketers need to understand why and how consumers react to a crisis. We show that by de-coupling risk response behavior of consumers into the separate components of risk perception and risk attitude, a more robust conceptualization and prediction of consumers' reactions is possible. Such a framework helps to provide answers on how marketers can deal with such type of crises. The merits of this conceptualization are illustrated in two field studies that examine the reactions of German, Dutch, and American consumers to the BSE (madcow disease) crisis.

Utopia@Second_Millennium. Daedalus_Meets_Job

Through dialogue new worlds can be imagined. In this imaginary dialogue between the vision of Daedalus, speaking through J. B. S. Haldane, and the Old Testament visionary, Job, the relationship between nature and science is re-explored, re-examined and re-engaged. Their words bounce back off the media's contemporary imagining of the BSE crisis in Britain, an episode that profoundly questioned this nature-science interrelationship.

Identification of the Fish Species Processed to Fish Meal

As a consequence of the BSE crisis in Europe, the components of meal produced from fish or warm-blooded animals are under stricter control. PCR-based techniques for species identification of fish meal have been developed and applied to meals produced from a single species each, including herring, capelin, anchovy, horse mackerel and blue whiting. DNA was extracted by means of the cationic detergent cetyltrimethylammonium bromide and a region of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene was amplified using universal primers. The amplicon was further characterized by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) and single strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) analysis. A number of fish meals could be differentiated due to their species-specific DNA patterns.

Reinventing risk politics: reflexive modernity and the European BSE crisis

The recent BSE crisis in Europe is an example of a new kind of risk in late-modern society. Conventional risk politics are no longer considered suitable for such new risks, leading to a new kind of risk politics. In answering the question whether a new kind of risk politics is developing and what this looks like, this contribution studies how several countries of Western Europe (the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany) as well as the EU dealt with the BSE crisis. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Risky Discourses: The Politics of GM Foods

Risk is a category that has been filled by the contingency of history; it is a way of structuring reality and rendering it intelligible. In western societies, risk has traditionally been identified and defined by a phalanx of social institutions, which have constituted the dominant 'relations of definition' (Beck, 1995). Despite the expansion of 'expert' methods of risk assessment, in recent times, a series of cases of institutional mismanagement - the BSE crisis being the most notorious - have thrown into doubt the ability of expert systems to effectively identify and mitigate social risks. In the last decade, the hegemonic relations of risk definition have increasingly been challenged by a plethora of subaltern discourses, which have emerged from civil society. These discourses have forced an institutional reflexivity that acknowledges the need for greater participatory equality in risk characterisation. However, drawing on the ongoing debate about GM foods, we argue in this paper that there are particular technologies of government which limit the democratisation of risk definition in contemporary western society.

Retailers' branding strategies: Contract design, organisational change and learning

This article analyses the recent development by some large retailers in France of dedicated Quality Supply Chains for their food products. The major contractual innovation rests on the design of tripartite contracts between a retailer, agro-food firms and farmers' associations. In contrast to mainstream contract literature, we demonstrate that contract adaptations may reflect a mutual learning process between contractors: why do transactors write explicit contracts that they know cannot be court enforced? Empirical data are based on the joint analysis of a full set of contracts between one retailer and all its beef suppliers, and their diachronic evolution before and after the BSE crisis (the period 1993-2000). Contract design and organisational changes at the retailer level are shown to be strongly interrelated.

‘The Appliance of Science’: The Politics of European Food Regulation and Reform

Amid increasing political anxiety generated by the BSE crisis, the European Union (EU) has sought to replace a confusing medley of food laws with a Food Safety Agency (EFSA) responsible for regulation from the farm to the fork’. Presented as an alluring cocktail of science and administrative change, the agency's remit will extend to redefining the relationship between risk assessment, its management and communication. In this context, this article advances three principle arguments. First, that any reform undertaken has been required to acknowledge the international agreements between the EU and the USA which have extended further the role of the free market in food trade. The agency's institutional architecture has therefore been framed by the imperative to construct an authority capable of restoring market confidence without threatening the habitat of those multi-national companies which occupy this arena. A second, related argument suggests that the role of risk (and science) in food regulation has altered. Rather than perform the task of sustaining order through responsible government, science now participates in (re)constituting order through the market. The role of science is now about creating and sustaining the view that ‘risks’ are an attendant feature of day to day life, and what matters is how we, as individuals, make judgments about those risks. Its role is to establish definitively whether a product or process will be detrimental to public health, thereby establishing negligence or culpability. Finally, the article suggests that the EU's attempt at reform has been influenced considerably by policy learning between member states, particularly that of Ireland.

Public attitudes, scientific advice and the politics of regulatory policy: the case of BSE

The policy response to the UK BSE crisis in 1996 has extended beyond risk management. In particular, the relationship between scientific advice and regulatory policy has been questioned. To regain public trust, scientific advice needs to be evaluated against various criteria, including the quality of the advice, whether it is transparent and intelligible, and the effectiveness of communication practices and strategies. There should be recommendations for best practice regarding public consultation and involvement, and explicit assessment of both scientific advice and public consultation on policy development. These criteria would provide a counter-political imperative to the natural inclination of the existing scientific advisory system to fall back on the style and culture of positivistic science when a problem appears complex, or when lobbying for a particular course of action that supports a particular interest is strong and influential. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The Regulation of Risks and the Power of the People: Lessons from the BSE Crisis

The implementation of European law is widely regarded as a technical matter - primarily dealt with in intra-administrative procedures and removed from the impact of public opinion. In European risk regulation, however, public concern can easily become very important, to the point of dominating administrative logic. The BSE crisis is a case in point: it emphasises the need to regard policy implementation as a political process which develops through the tension between supranational legal norms, governmental interests and public concerns. It furthermore underlines that effectiveness and the social acceptance of rules must be viewed as two sides of one coin. If public concerns shall not become the Achilles' heel of effective European risk regulation, the EC is well advised to attach increasing importance to the insight that effective law is inherently political law.

A note on modeling consumer reactions to a crisis: The case of the mad cow disease

What drives the behavior of consumers when faced with a product-related crisis, such as that involving food contamination or life-threatening design flaws? For both consumers and companies, these crises have become of increasing importance because of the globalization of markets and an increased coverage by the media. Marketers need to understand why and how consumers react to a crisis. We show that by decoupling risk response behavior of consumers into the separate components of risk perception and risk attitude, a more robust conceptualization and prediction of consumers' reactions is possible. Such a framework helps provide answers on how marketers can deal with such types of crises. The merits of this conceptualization are illustrated in two field studies that examine the reactions of German, Dutch, and American consumers to the BSE (mad cow disease) crisis.

Mad cows and British politicians: The role of scientific and national identities in managing blame for the BSE crisis

Article Mad cows and British politicians: The role of scientific and national identities in managing blame for the BSE crisis was published on July 3, 2002 in the journal Text & Talk (volume 22, issue 2).

Transgenesis applied to transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) are fatal neurodegenerative disorders present in various mammals. TSEs have been studies intensively, even more so following the BSE crisis and the subsequent threat of a human nvCJD epidemic. In the 'protein-only' hypothesis, the infectious agent, called prion, is assumed to be a misfolded host protein. Transgenesis has mainly been applied to study the role of this protein, its structure-function relationship with respect to its pathogenic properties and to assess the genetic origin of the well-recognised species barrier effect. This approach has somewhat supplemented the lack of in vitro models. This review will try to summarise the impressive work that has been done in this field. Although many questions remain unanswered, transgenic experiments have and will still improve our knowledge on this disease and might help us to develop critically needed therapeutic approaches.

Consumer Reactions to a Crisis

What drives the behavior of consumers when faced with a product-related crisis, such as that involving food contamination or live-threatening design flaws? For both consumers and companies, these crises are become of increasing importance because of the globalization of markets and an increased coverage by the media. These crises show the need for marketers to understand why and how consumers react to a crisis. We show that by de-coupling risk response behavior of consumers into the separate components of risk perception and risk attitude, a more robust conceptualization and prediction of consumers’ reactions is possible. In addition, such a framework helps to provide answers on how marketers can deal with such type of crises. The merits of such conceptualization are illustrated in two field studies in the US, Germany and the Netherlands, in the context of the recent BSE (mad cow disease) crisis.

Transparent science. Nature adopts new guidelines asking authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Transparency is the buzz‐word of the moment. An information explosion through the vast reaches of the Internet has exposed science, medicine, law, religion and politics to intense public scrutiny. And this is no bad thing. An informed society is one that can reach decisions from a sound ethical and knowledgeable base. But the internal confines of the scientific community have felt somewhat immune to this trend—despite being increasingly held accountable by the public in the wake of the BSE crisis and the debate around genetically modified foods—believing itself to be sufficiently open. In an ideal world, science is objective: the results of an experiment should be evaluated without massaging the data or manipulating them in any way. However, whether consciously or subconsciously, the danger is that these data may sometimes be interpreted in a certain, more favourable, light. With private funding of basic research on the increase, potential conflicts of interest are becoming more frequent and scientists may have more than their reputations at stake when making their results public. > With private funding of basic research on the increase, potential conflicts of interest are becoming more frequent To make such conflicts more transparent and open to the judgement of others, many scientific journals have the policy of asking their authors to voluntarily disclose any conflicts of interest that may have affected their work. Nature is the most recent amongst these to have adopted this stance, and with such a high‐profile journal highlighting the potential problem, it could be that others will soon follow suit. ‘We do not see that these networks between industry and academic research are a bigger problem and we also did not need to fill any gaps in the system, but we think that this is a step towards more transparency,’ Philip Campbell, Nature 's editor‐in‐chief, explained. …

Coronary heart disease versus BSE: characterising official British expert advisory committees

The BSE crisis has led scholars to put forward significant generalisations about UK expert committees concerning their selection, function, and nature of debate. This paper explores two expert committees, which advised the UK Government on policy towards diet and heart disease during the post-war period. However in this paper I show that the generalisations drawn from the BSE crisis do not fit the expert committees on diet and heart disease. This brings into question the scope of these generalisations. It would appear that the time honoured refrain of more research needed could not be closer to the truth. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The BSE Crisis: Science, Politics and Economics at Loggerheads

The BSE Crisis: Science, Politics and Economics at Loggerheads

The Government, Mad Cows and the Public: Access to Information and the BSE Crisis

The Government, Mad Cows and the Public: Access to Information and the BSE Crisis