How France
hid its own mad cow disease epidemic
Source of Article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1083643/How-France-hid-mad-cow-disease-epidemic.html
By Ian Sparks
Last updated at 11:12 PM on
06th November 2008
The scale of France's mad
cow disease epidemic has been laid bare in a report from scientists.
The revelation that BSE was
rife in France in the
early 1990s comes a decade after its illegal ban on British beef drove many UK farmers
into bankruptcy.
The study was ordered by a Paris judge
investigating why nine French citizens died from variant Creuzfeldt-Jakob
disease, the human form of BSE, between 1996 and 2006.
It found that their lives could
have been saved if the French government had done more to prevent the spread
of the disease after its discovery in 1986.
Beef
controversy: French scientists have launched a stinging attack on their own
government over the handling of mad cow disease in the 1990s
Officials had insisted then
that French beef was safe to consume.
The study, published yesterday,
noted BSE was officially first detected in Britain in 1986 and steps taken
in this country to combat it.
However, a French law in 1990
stating that farmers must declare any BSE found in their cattle came 'several
years too late'.
The report also exposes the
hypocrisy of France's
insistence that during the 1990s British herds were riddled with mad cow
disease, while French beef was safe to eat.
The EU finally lifted a trade
embargo on British beef in 1999, after years of trade sanctions.
France continued with an illegal ban on our
meat for another seven years.
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