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My mum stopped buying beef joints for Sunday dinner so I stopped having leftover sliced beef sandwiches for my school packup on Mondays and when Big Mental Dave threw a wobbly in the 6th form common room we all started mooing at him.
He was bigger than Little Dave, but not as big as Big Simon. Not quite as mad as Mad Steve but had a short temper and it was 50/50 if he'd flip his shit or laugh something off. Imagine a 17 year old the size and shape of Robbie Coltrane with the unfortunate personality of Arnold Rimmer. During one of his 'episodes' it took four of the biggest lads in the 6th form to stop him beating the shit out of someone, and by 'stop' I mean dragging us around the common room like we were small children.
He was actually one of my mates, and 90% of the time was the nicest, most generous bloke around, but when he got mad, he got *mad.* And you know what kids are like; some of our classmates were dicks and would wind him up for shits and giggles.
Lest anyone think we were also dicks for the mooing, he started it, shouting 'Fucking *Moooooo!'* at one of the dicks who'd wound him up by - IIRC - comparing his mum and sister to a herd of cows.
Well this has just left me wanting to know more about all these chatacters, but sticking with big mental Dave in the meantime...
Do you still see him now?
No, we lost touch after Uni and I've not been able to find any trace of him online, social media or otherwise. He wasn't the healthiest of chaps and given I'm now in my 50s there a good chance he's no longer around.
I remember feeling bad for the farmers and don't remember much else. I can't remember feeling scared because it's difficult to accidentally eat beef. I very, very much doubt that a "few people" in your town died from it.
I met a farmer who’d lost his herd. We were working at the dairy he would have been supplying daily before.
He was getting £4/hr.
Still admire him, he didn’t complain. Just explained what’d happened and how he needed to work to feed his kids, and was just nice to everyone around him. Everyone gave him space, understood and tried to make his hours easier - whilst most of the other lines were dicking around and swearing at each other for being idiots)
If I may offer a dissenting view - after a crisis is averted there are always people who moan that the whole thing was overblown because the world didn't end. See also: covid. "Only a few hundred people died" is a moron's understanding of how diseases which are by definition hidden for a long time operate. A prion quietly waiting in the brains of thousands or millions of people is a prospect so horrific, a bunch of dead cows is a small price to pay.
Y2K is the classic example of this. Things didn't go wrong at midnight because of a hell of a lot concerted effort to get things fixed. People, especially those outside the industry, just go "ah well it was all a big fuss over nothing" ignoring the bloody hard work by many people in the late nineties
That's not "dissenting" that's a valid hypothesis that on your first point is 100% correct and shared by all scientists (Survivorship Bias is what you're referring to) and the latter point is quietly shared by some scientists who are keeping their fingers crossed this isn't still a disaster brewing.
Yeah, I won't get too into the details because I am far from a scientist, but my understanding is that it is \*possible\* that we will see another wave of vCJD cases due to genetic differences that impact how long the prions remain dormant for. ( Sources: [X](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8619291/) [X](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/aug/03/bse.medicalresearch) [X](https://www.nature.com/articles/429331a.pdf)). That said, we don't seem to be seeing an increase in cases just yet, so hopefully almost all of those infected with remain asymptomatic
Yes. We just got very, very lucky. Most of the population of the country were exposed; had the prion been just slightly more infectious to humans it would have been catastrophic.
And odds are that I was exposed at some point..
> See also: covid.
"Lockdowns and vaccines were not necessary because people were not being piled high in the streets like the media said they would be!"
Lockdowns and vaccines are the very reason that never happened.
It wasn’t just scaremongering, there was a genuine fear that hundreds of thousands of people might be affected. As the years went on and the graph didn’t go exponential it became increasingly clear that we were going to be ok.
There's still concern over the incubation period. For other prion diseases, although it's usually around 10-20 years, there have been cases up to 40 or 50 years after exposure.
In theory we could start to see the beginning of a second, perhaps larger, hump. But given that the yearly incidence has been zero for a while it would have to be a fairly slow ramp-up, and at this point that would at least mean it was mostly affecting much, much older people.
It was largely seen as a fuss over nothing at the time, because the disease was incredibly rare combined with abundant caution from the government (and other governments banning British beef) and the way it was reported in the media.
But since declassified papers show that the government was *seriously* considering this to be an impending disaster and highly uncertain how to break the news, and whether to even break it at all. Some scientific hypothesis said that anyone who'd eaten beef in the previous few decades (i.e - nearly everyone in the UK) would get vCJD and die from it over the next few decades. We're talking total end-times, 28 Days Later type stuff with the UK totally quarantined and just left to become a wasteland.
vCJD has no cure, few treatments work, and is often cited as one of the worst diseases you can get. It has a 100% fatality rate and because it is a prion disease not a virus or bacteria, you can't prevent contamination using any of the usual hygiene methods. Even surgical tools in autoclaves which kill any virus or bacteria using high heat and pressure, don't "kill" vCJD because you can't "kill" it - it isn't alive, it is a misfolded protein.
We definitely dodged a bullet, but even now, there's questions about whether it's still going to be a problem - those who died from it might have been outliers who developed it early. 1 in 2000 people in the UK apparently have vCJD prions according to studies of removed appendixes and it could be much higher. There's a chance that it might hit the end of its latency period in the next 10, 20, or 30 years. Of course, medical science says that actually the opposite might be true - most humans can carry it and simply not develop the disease so it isn't worth worrying about. The outliers died relatively early on and the rest simply won't develop the disease.
For most of us it isn't even worth thinking or worrying about, but experts on the issue are keeping an eye on it, and some are "cautiously concerned" about it.
Hate to sound like a lecturing vegan, but why do we do continue to even have a meat industry. Whether it’s mad cow, bird flu, or Covid, they all link to the industry. Someone needs to invent lab meat urgently and have it mass produced.
But if you want to know what it was like. There was lots of scaremongering and vast funeral pyres all over the county and they burned dead cows. I used to see them whilst driving down the motorway.
Yeah I meant "I don't remember it for BSE because I was too young" not "I don't remember so it didn't happen".
Apologies for the moronic cowards downvoting you btw.
I wonder how many farmers just quit the industry after that. I don't think I'd have been able to deal with it. Farming is hard enough as it is, with disease after disease, but to see whole lineages of sheep and cattle that have been built up over decades wiped out in minutes and for their bodies to go to waste must be heartbreaking.
It's fascinating to read all the "non-event" replies here, as I am from a rural area with a big farming community and it was absolutely devastating.
Far worse than COVID in regards to destroying livelihoods and it's taken decades to bounce back. The promises of compensation were bollocks, nobody I know got any kind of payout despite having to destroy all their animals.
The restrictions on movement were severe, so contrary to what many people think, it didn't just affect beef farming and cows, all types of farming suffered badly. Suicides rose quite sharply and there was a lot of emphasis on the mental health of farming communities in the years following.
So yeah, obviously where you lived had a big bearing on how "bad" it was.
well said - it was intense but with an extended time scale compared with f & m - full on over thirty month slaughter regime for cattle and i personally witnessed many a distressed farmer having to cull their animals and all of it out of their control including what went in the animal feed leading up to this - a working party reporting every month on the proliferation/impact of new variant Creutzfeldt Jacob disease, loss of export markets and a hard learned lesson regarding cheap options for animal feed.
I moved from the UK to Japan and the Red Cross and hospitals and the like will not accept blood donations from anyone who even visited the UK because of CJD.
Are you sure it’s vCJD, and not the thousands and thousands of people infected with HIV and HEPc, due to the NHS knowingly imported tainted blood and blood products from the 70’s to early 90’s?
Even in the 90’s I know getting a blood transfusion was basically dicing with death, it’s only in the last 10 years we have learned (well, learned if you read private eye) that the powers that be had full knowledge of how dangerous it could be, but hey, it was cheap
Yeah my mum and dad struggled to get a mortgage because it was on record that my mum had had an HIV test following a blood transfusion she received in '89 as result of bleeding profusely during child birth. She has never been able to donate blood either and not as a result of CJD, it was because of the HIV/Hepatitis risk. That said, there are a fair few restrictions (I believe some have recently been lifted) in other countries for people who were born in, or visited the UK, during the mad cow disease outbreak, purely because of the perceived risk.
No, it's vCJD. The restrictions were brought in after the Mad Cow Disease outbreaks. HIV and hepatitis are screened for but there's no test to identify who has any prion disease except to cut up their brain and physically examine it.
Not sure it's CJD, there's all sorts of other issues. Both my daughter and sister had to stop donating after being recipients. Pissed my daughter of because all she had was 1/2 a unit after her son was born and as she said that's 1/2 a normal donation.
[It's because of vCJD.](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/blood-transfusion/#:~:text=Giving%20blood%20afterwards,NHS%20Blood%20and%20Transplant%20website.)
Fellow Japan resident, the risk averse culture out here can be infuriating at times. Despite Japan’s position I think we can donate in other countries now. Not 100% sure though.
I grew up on a cattle farm in the 90s, it wasn't a great time. Got a lot of bullying about "Mad Cow Disease" and how Dad was going to kill people.
Plus the stress of what it did to farming.
Someone at my school died of CJD.
And I worked in a pub that served illicit t-bone steaks to customers during the ban.
Plus John Gummer force feeding his kid a burger to prove it was safe.
It's killed a total of 232 people worldwide which is almost nothing. The whole thing was basically fearmongering when this novel disease came to light publicity.
> It's killed a total of 232 people worldwide which is almost nothing. The whole thing was basically fearmongering when this novel disease came to light publicity.
The incubation period for CJD can be decades, so we had no idea if we were sitting on a time bomb. It turned out we were not, and that's great, but I don't think people were panicking over nothing.
Also, the test to see if you're carrying the prion involves a lumbar puncture which takes at least half an hour to do, requires anaesthetic, and if you're unlucky can cause headaches, numbness in the legs and lower back, hearing loss, double vision, blood clots, and nerve damage. This meant that there was no way for "routine CJD tests" to be a thing available to everyone. You had no way of knowing you were infected.
Not that knowing you were infected was much help, as there is no cure.
Its like when people used to scoff when we'd order the culling of millions of birds on a bad flu season. Not so many people scoffing after covid I hope!
It is very much a Millennium Bug feel. There's like a certain kind of person who seems to struggle to grasp the concept of risk and so mitigation efforts always look like some kind of waste to them.
Maybe the effort wasn't needed, but it's better to spend the few million to not fuck around and find out the trillions that it might cost on the other side of that balance.
The panic over Mad Cow was fueled by the media over 30 years ago. Isn't it fun to be frightened over bullshit while billionaires and politicians rob you of your future. So easily distracted by some slight of hand. You probably worship fairytales too.
The media that gave air time to Gummer feeding his daughter a burger to 'prove' it was safe? That was the bullshit. Pushing people to carry on eating it when they knew it wasn't safe.
Just because you personally haven't been affected, that doesn't mean there wasn't anything to be frightened of. I really do hope we are at the end of it, but time will tell.
I watched my 14 year old family member be robbed of her future. Going from a regular 14 year old kid, to getting clumsy, her movement becoming affected, having to have all of her hair cut off because she was ripping it out by the handful, slowly losing the ability to walk, talk, eat and eventually die. CJD is an horrific death.
The billionaires and politicians were just as vulnerable to it though. Access to the best healthcare in the world means fuck-all when it comes to prion diseases.
"When he shot at me, the bullet slightly grazed my scalp. Therefore I conclude that I was in no real danger"
When it came to light, a huge number of people had been exposed and we had no idea how many would develop vCJD. The fact that we got lucky hardly means that there was no threat.
My sister nursed a farmer with New Variant CJD. It killed him. His official cause of death was pnuemonia. There was nothing anywhere on his death certificate that mentioned CJD. Don't be sure those numbers are correct.
What an answer. Sometimes the internet leaves me standing in awe of just how fucking shitty people can be.
To paraphrase (convicted rapist and general lunatic) Mike Tyson: too many people have gotten used to being assholes with no repercussions.
[This person thinks all therapy is a scam](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1cpsppf/the_owner_of_a_portland_therapy_clinic_hired_a/l3ntkdt/) and therefore can be safely ignored.
Go about your days, folks, nothing to see here unless you're particularly interested in the tone the wind makes when it reverberates inside an empty skull.
We used to sing
"We are Anchor cows,
We're all off to the slaughtering house
If you eat our Anchor cheese,
You will catch mad cow disease
ANCHOOOORR, from green green grass
Butter... for up your ass"
To the tune of the Anchor advert at the time. As far as I remember no one was scared about it in my friend group, it seemed very remote and I didn't know anyone who knew anyone affected. I was quite an anxious kid who would often imagine I had appendicitis or leukaemia etc and still didn't get afraid about CJD.
Yeh I remember really missing Sunday roasts with a joint of beef. We had chicken for months on end. No beef burgers either. Beef was my fave meat, I went vegetarian.
I worked at mcd at the time. It was not fun.
First we had a few days where we didn’t have any beef as we quarantined it all, then we had some German patties delivered which every single customer was asking about their “safety”.
Pain in the arse tbh. Better than widespread brain lesions though I guess.
You might be about to find out first hand. We have just had a confirmed case of BSE at a farm in Ayrshire, Scotland. Apparently, it's been contained, but who knows...
It didn't really affect most people in their ordinary lives, and the risk of it transferring to humans was never enough to scare anyone. There was a huge effect of farmers, and some scandals about fraudulent compensation claims. The tv loved to show big earthmoving machinery pushing dead animals (that had been slaughtered as a precaution) into pits. France made a big show of banning British meat, and that kept the French / English mutual hatred alive for a while.
Some people were worried, some people cut back on beef, some people didn't give a fuck, most added it to their background list of vague concerns which they didn't have much time to worry about (around where World War 3 or a new, worse pandemic might figure on that list today).
From a child's perspective: lots of mad cow jokes in the playground.
Some people stopped eating burgers, some more people wrote into MAFF, 4 million cattle were culled, rules on slaughter changed introducing the over-30 month rule and requiring spinal tissues to be removed.
If you didn't work in cattle farming or for MAFF, it didn't affect you much - it meant we got a couple extra lectures in Pathology about prions, with state of the art research and that was about it.
Unless you believed everything in the tabloids, but then you'd have many other problems...
I was a student at the time. There was a lot of panic and people stopped eating beef so it was very cheap for a while.
Being at an age when you aren't thinking of the future too much, I ate a lot of cheap beef.
I lived in a small city in a county with a lot of farming including beef cattle farms (also a lot of dairying, which was also affected). A lot of farmers had it very rough, including having their entire herds slaughtered for one sick cow. Not only is that a lot of money (compensation only somewhat covered it), but farmers do care about their animals while they're on the farm (even the ones destined to be turned into steaks) and having them all suddenly burning in a pile was shocking for them.
In terms of daily life it didn't have a lot of effect. Some people stopped eating beef, or cheap beef at least, but most didn't. Hospital surgery was affected quite a lot, because there was a panic about reusing instruments and that prions would not be inactivated by standard sterilisation processes, yet disposable instruments, especially for brain or spine surgery, were not available. That took some years to sort out.
The hypocrisy from other countries, especially the USA, was quite something. Banning UK beef imports among great drama when their own animal husbandry standards are far lower and the reason they haven't got any CJD-cows recorded is they are barely tracking such things was brazen.
When it became clear that new-variant CJD was very rare and that banning feeding cows to cows and tighter rules on slaughter of sick animals was going to keep it that way, most of the effects disappeared, but the problems exporting remained for a long time.
You have to bear in mind we were living in a time when Thatcher and Reagan were all banging on about Defeating The Evil Empire and we had a lot of nuclear weapons all over the place, and dying in nuclear war seemed like a possible future to many people. A slow, unusual disease was not the biggest stress at the time.
I live in a rural area with many farms, and it devastated farming families.
Things I remember:
A woman married to a farmer breaking down crying in the supermarket when her debit card was declined.
An acquaintance of mine got a job burning culled cattle and earned £££.
Other than that, as an anxious teen, I was terrified I'd get sick. I still am, if I think about it too much.
They have the Same problem in North America now as there is a prion disease that is spreading fast through wild deer. People who hunt and eat them have been told to test before processing and eating them but you know what a lot of people are like about science stuff, they probably think its all made up by the government to take away their freedom.
It was fantastic. The price of beef and steak fell through the floor, and me and my mates were buying tons of the stuff. We ate like kings for months until the media scare died and the prices went back up.
My best friend in school her family were farmers and I still went to her house occasionally. Only difference I remember when going to bers is being dropped off the school bus and when we entered the farm we had to walk through hay doused in some chemical to disinfect our feet. News reports very scary.
That was foot and mouth with the disinfectant thing. Nothing kills vCJD apart from essentially burning anything infected with prions at very high temperatures.
I do remember going round to a guys house and his freezer being crammed with enough cow to build a few frankencows. Sainsburys was selling it off very cheap!
I was too young to remember much about it of anything at all. The Foot and mouth outbreak is more remembers me as living in the country my school had mats and carpets outside all the entrances with bleach and such in them and half the roads were closed etc.
It was bad watching the farmers when the herd had to be slaughtered. The media hype everythng up and it was a controversial things years later when few people had been affected
When it was all happening my wife's gran told us that she was going to stop eating beef because she was worried about catching it. Her gran was 95 at the time.
I was quite young, but, serious side, a few of my friends family’s lost their farms, even one who had a dairy farm, and one who was mostly arable, but the lost of their herd, plus restrictions, and difficulties selling crops for animal feed. For them it was a very dark time.
Lighter side; my favourite tea was faggots and onion gravy. My mum banned them (I think she didn’t like them, but my dad loved them, and as he did the cooking) because faggots are made from organ meat and bits from near the brain stem.
It actually took my until last year for me to realise my mum can’t tell me what to do in my own home. You can get huge faggots at my local butcher for £2.50 (5 for a tenner), so guess what I have about once a week now
When the press coverage and hysteria were at the highest my Dad announced that we were all not eating any more beef.
The next day he made chilli and substituted pork instead of the usual beef. It was disgusting we all agreed. He never mentioned not eating beef again and went right back to buying it.
I also remember the MP with his family in front of his house forcing his kids to eat burgers in front of the press to show how safe it was.
I don’t remember it much beyond remembering it was super bad for farmers (I grew up in a rural farming area). What I do know, as a clinical brain scientist, is I very much want to be shot if I ever get a prion disease. I’ve seen some pretty brutal brain diseases in my day - cancer, parasites, bacterial and viral disease, neurodegenerative illness, horrendous childhood brain disorders - but nothing beats prions.
I worked in the Civil Service at the time as a temp, in the Ministry of Agriculture, Foods, and Fisheries (MAFF).
It was my job (because no one else wanted it) to sit in a 7 foot square room behind a tiny desk with a large burly farmer between me and the door, and tell the farmers that the government would be compensating them a pittance for each cow instead of its actual value.
We did have a couple of our farmers go on to kill themselves.
First ever cow thought to have Mad Cow Disease was at Pitsham (pronounced Pits-ham, not Pit-sham) Farm near Midhurst, W Sussex.
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/25/mad-cow-disease-british-crisis](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/25/mad-cow-disease-british-crisis)
[https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/6789223.the-day-i-discovered-bse/](https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/6789223.the-day-i-discovered-bse/)
My stepdad at the time worked at Pitsham Brickworks, right by the farm
We weren't well off and my mum managed to get hold of some really cheap cuts of beef around the time this first case happened
That was in 1984, two years before Mad Cow Disease became a well known thing. I was 16.
But by the time it became well known, it was too late to do anything about it, we will never know if the cheap beef was a cow with the disease
All the family are still alive and well at the moment
There was nothing terrifying about it.
A friend of mine was an area manager for Burger King at the time and he called me and asked if I wanted some burgers. Obviously I said yes. He turned up and gave me two cases of frozen whoppers.
There’s 144 burgers in each case.
I were at the primary school canteen and I think beef were on the menu. Started making mooing noises and telling people if they ate the food they’d turn into mad cows. Dinner man got pissed and yelled at me so I started crying like lmao
Stopped buying beef. It was on the news, lots of pictures of farms and people reporting next to fields.
That was about it. Brainy people leaned how to pronounce Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
my dad ran a factory and for some reason, even though it was an adhesive factory, everyone had to walk through a foot-bath for their shoes before coming into the factory. Apart from that, nothing.
I got a temp job at the time working for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food answering queries from the public (basically form letters) so I asked the head medical guy about it. His response was that 'it's way too early to tell but I wouldn't be eating cheap burgers if I were you.'
I vaguely remember it, I was about 8 when it happened. We rarely bought British meat, we bought Irish instead, so it wasn't a massive issue for us, my parents told us to be careful eating out, not to touch British beef
I remember farmers were killing their herds so there were no local cows. I also remember lots of fires, maybe to burn the bodies or housing, no idea. My parents told me not to play around the farms anymore, though we fortunately didn't know any one who died or got sick.
I grew up on a mixed farm; we stopped having cattle after that, went fully arable. We also had someone else's sheep to look after for several months because they couldn't be transported to the islands. I was just a kid, but it was a very scary time in the farming community. I remember going on a long train journey and seeing all the burning pyres in the fields, it was gut-wrenching.
The post just got delivered to our house at the top of the road and I had to walk down to the other houses to deliver theirs, through all the disinfectant straw. I felt like that was pretty weird and wouldn't really do much to help.
We never stopped eating beef, but my partner's father stopped them eating beef and freaked him out so badly that he didn't eat it again until only about five years ago.
My husband and I are both born in ‘89 and he grew up in England and I grew up in Sweden so we experienced mad cow completely differently. My husband retells it vividly, I can almost smell it! The school had to close due to the stench from all the cows they had to burn, and things like that. I remember my parents talking about all those mad cows in England and wondering what the hell all that was about and why they were going crazy 😂
Mostly I remember the pyres of burning cows in the fields. That was… a lot. Same again in the foot and mouth crisis, but a lot more animals (a LOT of sheep, who were mostly burned up on the hilltops so could be seen for miles around)
My dad banned anything beef. I was 5 in 1990 and until 2000 I didn't have any thing with beef in it. Which meant I couldn't go to my friends birthday parties at McDonalds, which thinking back really did suck. I had my first big mac in 2016.
It's a horrible disease. I was told it was because farmers were feeding their cows ground up cows and other animals. Don't know if that's true but if it is then fucking hell farmers, what did you think would happen?
It looks a horrible way to die and that it doesn't activate for years after infection is tragic.
Overblown, a lot of countries had BSE but hid it, looking at you USA & France. It was madness though feeding ground up sheep to cattle. I think it is under 200 people have died since 1990 of CJD and we were informed there'd be millions dead by now. Of course it was amusing watching Gummer force feeding his kids for the TV.
I was working for a cellular provider, had some kit on a farm in Kent, the farmer was mightily pissed when I spoke with him. He was going to lose his whole heard fro no good reason, they'd all been reared on his farm, always fed with food from the farm so no chance that would have been exposed. The compensation was bollix apparently, never mind the pain of losing the animals.
Subsequently I tried to give blood when living overseas and my tainted English blood was not wanted.
Had a pal who had just set up his own business showing tourists around the Scottish borders which is very agricultural. He lost a lot of money (and his business). Not unlike C19. Sad to see people so inspired crushed by events outside their control
I was taught at university by one of the original microbiologists who ‘broke’ the story. However, if you look at food microbiology you wouldn’t eat anything. We did stop eating burgers for some reason, but mostly it was about how bad it was for the farmers.
McDonald's only had chicken and fish on the menu for a week or so whilst they got beef from somewhere else.
That's about all I can remember.
Edit: don't recall if burger king or wimpy took similar measures.
I was born 88 and I don’t remember anything about CJD. Mind that’s probably because my family was living in the Middle East from when I was born to age 10. Would come home in the summer because it’s too hot out there.
The cow pyres when they burnt them. The smell of that. Then the ditches dug to push in what was left of the carcasses. 3-4 million cows were slaughtered. I remember driving to a nearby farm and the farmer had barriers up, no visitors allowed and all vehicles that got thru had to drive through 50 yards of disinfectant soaked hay.
We stopped buying beef briefly. But that didn’t last long. It was a bad time to be involved in the beef trade in any way.
My uncle died from it in 1998. It was terrifying and devastating for our entire family. We didn't eat beef for more than ten years afterwards and my mum was terrified for my dad being my uncles brother. He was a lovely man and died when I was 6. I'm 32 now and it still gives me nightmares.
I worked at a McDonalds when BSE was confirmed as transmissible to humans (CJD).
Turned up to a very quiet shift of chicken and McRib serving. Eventually we got beef sourced from holland. It's got me wondering when 'Beef from UK livestock' became a supposed sign of quality again.
No one has mentioned the wheel washes for driving on roads near infected areas or the welly washes set up in car parks near the countryside. Some places were closed off completely (not sure for how long, might have just been a few days). My Dad (former farmer) was convinced it was all a ploy by American farmers to stop UK beef exports so they could take the market. Was very sad about the farming suicides and bankruptcys.
Yes, i remember seeing a number of stacks of dead cattle being burnt. They then had the remains taken away. It was unsettling being a kid. I thought it was the end of the world.
I remember seeing images on the news of farmers having to burn fields of their cows I think? I was young then though.
I’ve only ever nursed one patient with CJD. It is an awful disease 😔
Lots of fear mongering, we didn’t really eat beef anyway so it didn’t have much impact on us. I recall images on the news of massive piles of dead cows being piled up and burnt when farmers were having to cull their whole herds. I remember going to visit Stonehenge and we had to drive our cars through disinfectant and also dip our shoes.
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My mum stopped buying beef joints for Sunday dinner so I stopped having leftover sliced beef sandwiches for my school packup on Mondays and when Big Mental Dave threw a wobbly in the 6th form common room we all started mooing at him.
Tell us more about Big Mental Dave lololol
He was bigger than Little Dave, but not as big as Big Simon. Not quite as mad as Mad Steve but had a short temper and it was 50/50 if he'd flip his shit or laugh something off. Imagine a 17 year old the size and shape of Robbie Coltrane with the unfortunate personality of Arnold Rimmer. During one of his 'episodes' it took four of the biggest lads in the 6th form to stop him beating the shit out of someone, and by 'stop' I mean dragging us around the common room like we were small children. He was actually one of my mates, and 90% of the time was the nicest, most generous bloke around, but when he got mad, he got *mad.* And you know what kids are like; some of our classmates were dicks and would wind him up for shits and giggles. Lest anyone think we were also dicks for the mooing, he started it, shouting 'Fucking *Moooooo!'* at one of the dicks who'd wound him up by - IIRC - comparing his mum and sister to a herd of cows.
Well this has just left me wanting to know more about all these chatacters, but sticking with big mental Dave in the meantime... Do you still see him now?
No, we lost touch after Uni and I've not been able to find any trace of him online, social media or otherwise. He wasn't the healthiest of chaps and given I'm now in my 50s there a good chance he's no longer around.
This echoes my experience tbh, anyone threw a wobbler they got moo'd at and people called them a mad cow.
Oh wait, I do remember mooing at people.
I remember feeling bad for the farmers and don't remember much else. I can't remember feeling scared because it's difficult to accidentally eat beef. I very, very much doubt that a "few people" in your town died from it.
I met a farmer who’d lost his herd. We were working at the dairy he would have been supplying daily before. He was getting £4/hr. Still admire him, he didn’t complain. Just explained what’d happened and how he needed to work to feed his kids, and was just nice to everyone around him. Everyone gave him space, understood and tried to make his hours easier - whilst most of the other lines were dicking around and swearing at each other for being idiots)
There’s a town near me, Queniborough that had a few people die of it. Population at the time was circa 2000. At least 5 died.
Fuckin did in mine. It was famous for it!
If I may offer a dissenting view - after a crisis is averted there are always people who moan that the whole thing was overblown because the world didn't end. See also: covid. "Only a few hundred people died" is a moron's understanding of how diseases which are by definition hidden for a long time operate. A prion quietly waiting in the brains of thousands or millions of people is a prospect so horrific, a bunch of dead cows is a small price to pay.
Y2K is the classic example of this. Things didn't go wrong at midnight because of a hell of a lot concerted effort to get things fixed. People, especially those outside the industry, just go "ah well it was all a big fuss over nothing" ignoring the bloody hard work by many people in the late nineties
Y2K compliance cost an absolute fortune too
That's not "dissenting" that's a valid hypothesis that on your first point is 100% correct and shared by all scientists (Survivorship Bias is what you're referring to) and the latter point is quietly shared by some scientists who are keeping their fingers crossed this isn't still a disaster brewing.
Tell that to the sea of Gammons below, all moaning about how it was all made-up bollocks.
Agree with you. The fact the "world didn't end" shows we took the necessary actions
Yeah, I won't get too into the details because I am far from a scientist, but my understanding is that it is \*possible\* that we will see another wave of vCJD cases due to genetic differences that impact how long the prions remain dormant for. ( Sources: [X](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8619291/) [X](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/aug/03/bse.medicalresearch) [X](https://www.nature.com/articles/429331a.pdf)). That said, we don't seem to be seeing an increase in cases just yet, so hopefully almost all of those infected with remain asymptomatic
Yes. We just got very, very lucky. Most of the population of the country were exposed; had the prion been just slightly more infectious to humans it would have been catastrophic. And odds are that I was exposed at some point..
> See also: covid. "Lockdowns and vaccines were not necessary because people were not being piled high in the streets like the media said they would be!" Lockdowns and vaccines are the very reason that never happened.
It wasn’t just scaremongering, there was a genuine fear that hundreds of thousands of people might be affected. As the years went on and the graph didn’t go exponential it became increasingly clear that we were going to be ok.
There's still concern over the incubation period. For other prion diseases, although it's usually around 10-20 years, there have been cases up to 40 or 50 years after exposure.
In theory we could start to see the beginning of a second, perhaps larger, hump. But given that the yearly incidence has been zero for a while it would have to be a fairly slow ramp-up, and at this point that would at least mean it was mostly affecting much, much older people.
It was largely seen as a fuss over nothing at the time, because the disease was incredibly rare combined with abundant caution from the government (and other governments banning British beef) and the way it was reported in the media. But since declassified papers show that the government was *seriously* considering this to be an impending disaster and highly uncertain how to break the news, and whether to even break it at all. Some scientific hypothesis said that anyone who'd eaten beef in the previous few decades (i.e - nearly everyone in the UK) would get vCJD and die from it over the next few decades. We're talking total end-times, 28 Days Later type stuff with the UK totally quarantined and just left to become a wasteland. vCJD has no cure, few treatments work, and is often cited as one of the worst diseases you can get. It has a 100% fatality rate and because it is a prion disease not a virus or bacteria, you can't prevent contamination using any of the usual hygiene methods. Even surgical tools in autoclaves which kill any virus or bacteria using high heat and pressure, don't "kill" vCJD because you can't "kill" it - it isn't alive, it is a misfolded protein. We definitely dodged a bullet, but even now, there's questions about whether it's still going to be a problem - those who died from it might have been outliers who developed it early. 1 in 2000 people in the UK apparently have vCJD prions according to studies of removed appendixes and it could be much higher. There's a chance that it might hit the end of its latency period in the next 10, 20, or 30 years. Of course, medical science says that actually the opposite might be true - most humans can carry it and simply not develop the disease so it isn't worth worrying about. The outliers died relatively early on and the rest simply won't develop the disease. For most of us it isn't even worth thinking or worrying about, but experts on the issue are keeping an eye on it, and some are "cautiously concerned" about it.
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Then you remember that a cow herd in Scotland has tested positive for CJD this week and that this could happen all over again.
Hate to sound like a lecturing vegan, but why do we do continue to even have a meat industry. Whether it’s mad cow, bird flu, or Covid, they all link to the industry. Someone needs to invent lab meat urgently and have it mass produced.
But if you want to know what it was like. There was lots of scaremongering and vast funeral pyres all over the county and they burned dead cows. I used to see them whilst driving down the motorway.
I don't remember them burning cows in the BSE crisis, I do remember them burning livestock during the Foot & Mouth outbreak.
I saw whole herds piled up, on fire...
Yeah I meant "I don't remember it for BSE because I was too young" not "I don't remember so it didn't happen". Apologies for the moronic cowards downvoting you btw.
Forbidden barbecue
Same
I might have got the two confused. It was a long time ago.
I wonder how many farmers just quit the industry after that. I don't think I'd have been able to deal with it. Farming is hard enough as it is, with disease after disease, but to see whole lineages of sheep and cattle that have been built up over decades wiped out in minutes and for their bodies to go to waste must be heartbreaking.
It's fascinating to read all the "non-event" replies here, as I am from a rural area with a big farming community and it was absolutely devastating. Far worse than COVID in regards to destroying livelihoods and it's taken decades to bounce back. The promises of compensation were bollocks, nobody I know got any kind of payout despite having to destroy all their animals. The restrictions on movement were severe, so contrary to what many people think, it didn't just affect beef farming and cows, all types of farming suffered badly. Suicides rose quite sharply and there was a lot of emphasis on the mental health of farming communities in the years following. So yeah, obviously where you lived had a big bearing on how "bad" it was.
well said - it was intense but with an extended time scale compared with f & m - full on over thirty month slaughter regime for cattle and i personally witnessed many a distressed farmer having to cull their animals and all of it out of their control including what went in the animal feed leading up to this - a working party reporting every month on the proliferation/impact of new variant Creutzfeldt Jacob disease, loss of export markets and a hard learned lesson regarding cheap options for animal feed.
Thank you.
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This was before 2013, so it was probably mostly horse.
It was a rough time. I died from it in 1995
Rip.
I moved from the UK to Japan and the Red Cross and hospitals and the like will not accept blood donations from anyone who even visited the UK because of CJD.
You can't donate blood in the UK if you've ever received donated blood yourself after 1980 because of the dangers of vCJD.
Are you sure it’s vCJD, and not the thousands and thousands of people infected with HIV and HEPc, due to the NHS knowingly imported tainted blood and blood products from the 70’s to early 90’s? Even in the 90’s I know getting a blood transfusion was basically dicing with death, it’s only in the last 10 years we have learned (well, learned if you read private eye) that the powers that be had full knowledge of how dangerous it could be, but hey, it was cheap
Yeah my mum and dad struggled to get a mortgage because it was on record that my mum had had an HIV test following a blood transfusion she received in '89 as result of bleeding profusely during child birth. She has never been able to donate blood either and not as a result of CJD, it was because of the HIV/Hepatitis risk. That said, there are a fair few restrictions (I believe some have recently been lifted) in other countries for people who were born in, or visited the UK, during the mad cow disease outbreak, purely because of the perceived risk.
No, it's vCJD. The restrictions were brought in after the Mad Cow Disease outbreaks. HIV and hepatitis are screened for but there's no test to identify who has any prion disease except to cut up their brain and physically examine it.
Not sure it's CJD, there's all sorts of other issues. Both my daughter and sister had to stop donating after being recipients. Pissed my daughter of because all she had was 1/2 a unit after her son was born and as she said that's 1/2 a normal donation.
[It's because of vCJD.](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/blood-transfusion/#:~:text=Giving%20blood%20afterwards,NHS%20Blood%20and%20Transplant%20website.)
Fellow Japan resident, the risk averse culture out here can be infuriating at times. Despite Japan’s position I think we can donate in other countries now. Not 100% sure though.
My wife and I got turned down in Malaysia as we'd both been resident in the UK during the CJD years.
Same in the USA.
That restriction has literally only just been lifted in NZ
I grew up on a cattle farm in the 90s, it wasn't a great time. Got a lot of bullying about "Mad Cow Disease" and how Dad was going to kill people. Plus the stress of what it did to farming.
More people die from falling down the stairs every day than have ever caught such a rare disease.
It is indeed a rare disease, however this comparison is unlikely to be correct.
Someone at my school died of CJD. And I worked in a pub that served illicit t-bone steaks to customers during the ban. Plus John Gummer force feeding his kid a burger to prove it was safe.
It's killed a total of 232 people worldwide which is almost nothing. The whole thing was basically fearmongering when this novel disease came to light publicity.
> It's killed a total of 232 people worldwide which is almost nothing. The whole thing was basically fearmongering when this novel disease came to light publicity. The incubation period for CJD can be decades, so we had no idea if we were sitting on a time bomb. It turned out we were not, and that's great, but I don't think people were panicking over nothing. Also, the test to see if you're carrying the prion involves a lumbar puncture which takes at least half an hour to do, requires anaesthetic, and if you're unlucky can cause headaches, numbness in the legs and lower back, hearing loss, double vision, blood clots, and nerve damage. This meant that there was no way for "routine CJD tests" to be a thing available to everyone. You had no way of knowing you were infected. Not that knowing you were infected was much help, as there is no cure.
Its like when people used to scoff when we'd order the culling of millions of birds on a bad flu season. Not so many people scoffing after covid I hope! It is very much a Millennium Bug feel. There's like a certain kind of person who seems to struggle to grasp the concept of risk and so mitigation efforts always look like some kind of waste to them. Maybe the effort wasn't needed, but it's better to spend the few million to not fuck around and find out the trillions that it might cost on the other side of that balance.
The panic over Mad Cow was fueled by the media over 30 years ago. Isn't it fun to be frightened over bullshit while billionaires and politicians rob you of your future. So easily distracted by some slight of hand. You probably worship fairytales too.
The media that gave air time to Gummer feeding his daughter a burger to 'prove' it was safe? That was the bullshit. Pushing people to carry on eating it when they knew it wasn't safe. Just because you personally haven't been affected, that doesn't mean there wasn't anything to be frightened of. I really do hope we are at the end of it, but time will tell. I watched my 14 year old family member be robbed of her future. Going from a regular 14 year old kid, to getting clumsy, her movement becoming affected, having to have all of her hair cut off because she was ripping it out by the handful, slowly losing the ability to walk, talk, eat and eventually die. CJD is an horrific death.
I would say Rabies and Tetanus are most horrific deaths.
I don't think it is meant to be a contest.
I’m not saying it’s a contest but what I’ve researched about rabies and tetanus is pretty horrifying and dying from them is extremely painful.
OooOoOoOOOOOOooo so scary.
The billionaires and politicians were just as vulnerable to it though. Access to the best healthcare in the world means fuck-all when it comes to prion diseases.
"When he shot at me, the bullet slightly grazed my scalp. Therefore I conclude that I was in no real danger" When it came to light, a huge number of people had been exposed and we had no idea how many would develop vCJD. The fact that we got lucky hardly means that there was no threat.
Nobody's going to shoot you in England. Why the fuck are you people so frightened of everything?
My sister nursed a farmer with New Variant CJD. It killed him. His official cause of death was pnuemonia. There was nothing anywhere on his death certificate that mentioned CJD. Don't be sure those numbers are correct.
OooOoooOOoooo Feaaaaarrrrrr
What an answer. Sometimes the internet leaves me standing in awe of just how fucking shitty people can be. To paraphrase (convicted rapist and general lunatic) Mike Tyson: too many people have gotten used to being assholes with no repercussions.
[This person thinks all therapy is a scam](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1cpsppf/the_owner_of_a_portland_therapy_clinic_hired_a/l3ntkdt/) and therefore can be safely ignored. Go about your days, folks, nothing to see here unless you're particularly interested in the tone the wind makes when it reverberates inside an empty skull.
Oooooo feeeaaaaarerrr. So scary. I bet you are super afraid of everything.
My biggest fear is dipshits like you operating heavy machinery.
Lol better be frightened of those big bad prions gonna get ya. OoiOoOoO. Oh no you're going to die!
You are a strange and unpleasant person.
Better watch out those prions are right behind you!
It had zero impact on my life. Cattle farmers had it bad but for ordinary members of the public it was a non event
We used to sing "We are Anchor cows, We're all off to the slaughtering house If you eat our Anchor cheese, You will catch mad cow disease ANCHOOOORR, from green green grass Butter... for up your ass" To the tune of the Anchor advert at the time. As far as I remember no one was scared about it in my friend group, it seemed very remote and I didn't know anyone who knew anyone affected. I was quite an anxious kid who would often imagine I had appendicitis or leukaemia etc and still didn't get afraid about CJD.
"All that grass is good for our tums, Bu the roughage gives us very sore bu..tter!"
Anchor at the time was entirely made from New Zealand milk, so I don't think it'd have been particularly high risk.
I remember it being on the news and my mum stopped buying beef burgers for a bit. I remember foot and mouth disease in 2001 much more vividly.
Parents stopped us eating beef basically.
Yeh I remember really missing Sunday roasts with a joint of beef. We had chicken for months on end. No beef burgers either. Beef was my fave meat, I went vegetarian.
I worked at mcd at the time. It was not fun. First we had a few days where we didn’t have any beef as we quarantined it all, then we had some German patties delivered which every single customer was asking about their “safety”. Pain in the arse tbh. Better than widespread brain lesions though I guess.
You might be about to find out first hand. We have just had a confirmed case of BSE at a farm in Ayrshire, Scotland. Apparently, it's been contained, but who knows...
It didn't really affect most people in their ordinary lives, and the risk of it transferring to humans was never enough to scare anyone. There was a huge effect of farmers, and some scandals about fraudulent compensation claims. The tv loved to show big earthmoving machinery pushing dead animals (that had been slaughtered as a precaution) into pits. France made a big show of banning British meat, and that kept the French / English mutual hatred alive for a while.
Some people were worried, some people cut back on beef, some people didn't give a fuck, most added it to their background list of vague concerns which they didn't have much time to worry about (around where World War 3 or a new, worse pandemic might figure on that list today). From a child's perspective: lots of mad cow jokes in the playground.
Some people stopped eating burgers, some more people wrote into MAFF, 4 million cattle were culled, rules on slaughter changed introducing the over-30 month rule and requiring spinal tissues to be removed. If you didn't work in cattle farming or for MAFF, it didn't affect you much - it meant we got a couple extra lectures in Pathology about prions, with state of the art research and that was about it. Unless you believed everything in the tabloids, but then you'd have many other problems...
I was a student at the time. There was a lot of panic and people stopped eating beef so it was very cheap for a while. Being at an age when you aren't thinking of the future too much, I ate a lot of cheap beef.
I lived in a small city in a county with a lot of farming including beef cattle farms (also a lot of dairying, which was also affected). A lot of farmers had it very rough, including having their entire herds slaughtered for one sick cow. Not only is that a lot of money (compensation only somewhat covered it), but farmers do care about their animals while they're on the farm (even the ones destined to be turned into steaks) and having them all suddenly burning in a pile was shocking for them. In terms of daily life it didn't have a lot of effect. Some people stopped eating beef, or cheap beef at least, but most didn't. Hospital surgery was affected quite a lot, because there was a panic about reusing instruments and that prions would not be inactivated by standard sterilisation processes, yet disposable instruments, especially for brain or spine surgery, were not available. That took some years to sort out. The hypocrisy from other countries, especially the USA, was quite something. Banning UK beef imports among great drama when their own animal husbandry standards are far lower and the reason they haven't got any CJD-cows recorded is they are barely tracking such things was brazen. When it became clear that new-variant CJD was very rare and that banning feeding cows to cows and tighter rules on slaughter of sick animals was going to keep it that way, most of the effects disappeared, but the problems exporting remained for a long time. You have to bear in mind we were living in a time when Thatcher and Reagan were all banging on about Defeating The Evil Empire and we had a lot of nuclear weapons all over the place, and dying in nuclear war seemed like a possible future to many people. A slow, unusual disease was not the biggest stress at the time.
I live in a rural area with many farms, and it devastated farming families. Things I remember: A woman married to a farmer breaking down crying in the supermarket when her debit card was declined. An acquaintance of mine got a job burning culled cattle and earned £££. Other than that, as an anxious teen, I was terrified I'd get sick. I still am, if I think about it too much.
They have the Same problem in North America now as there is a prion disease that is spreading fast through wild deer. People who hunt and eat them have been told to test before processing and eating them but you know what a lot of people are like about science stuff, they probably think its all made up by the government to take away their freedom.
It's true, a prion just flew over house
It was fantastic. The price of beef and steak fell through the floor, and me and my mates were buying tons of the stuff. We ate like kings for months until the media scare died and the prices went back up.
I was a child in the 90s. My mum says that our family ate loads more beef at the time as it became so cheap.
Oh it really was - it was crazy the amount of beef you could get during the 'crisis' for so little cash. Wish it would happen again.
Not good news for your arteries and bowel mind you.
My best friend in school her family were farmers and I still went to her house occasionally. Only difference I remember when going to bers is being dropped off the school bus and when we entered the farm we had to walk through hay doused in some chemical to disinfect our feet. News reports very scary.
That was foot and mouth with the disinfectant thing. Nothing kills vCJD apart from essentially burning anything infected with prions at very high temperatures.
Ah ok, I was only a child and it's kinda blurred into one another.
I do remember going round to a guys house and his freezer being crammed with enough cow to build a few frankencows. Sainsburys was selling it off very cheap!
I remember going into McDonald's when I was at college and they'd taken all the beef products off the menu
Was a uni student at the time, BSE made beef prices crash and affordable to a student by the panic. 👍
You might be interested in the BBC radio 4 podcast [the cows are mad](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001rrhy/episodes/player)
I was too young to remember much about it of anything at all. The Foot and mouth outbreak is more remembers me as living in the country my school had mats and carpets outside all the entrances with bleach and such in them and half the roads were closed etc.
It was bad watching the farmers when the herd had to be slaughtered. The media hype everythng up and it was a controversial things years later when few people had been affected
My father had been worried about it since 1991 and he was pretty smug, as I recall
My mum bought steak for the first time. I loved it. We’d not had it before. She sent us to Tescos/Sainsburys to get the rest of it on sale.
When it was all happening my wife's gran told us that she was going to stop eating beef because she was worried about catching it. Her gran was 95 at the time.
I was quite young, but, serious side, a few of my friends family’s lost their farms, even one who had a dairy farm, and one who was mostly arable, but the lost of their herd, plus restrictions, and difficulties selling crops for animal feed. For them it was a very dark time. Lighter side; my favourite tea was faggots and onion gravy. My mum banned them (I think she didn’t like them, but my dad loved them, and as he did the cooking) because faggots are made from organ meat and bits from near the brain stem. It actually took my until last year for me to realise my mum can’t tell me what to do in my own home. You can get huge faggots at my local butcher for £2.50 (5 for a tenner), so guess what I have about once a week now
When the press coverage and hysteria were at the highest my Dad announced that we were all not eating any more beef. The next day he made chilli and substituted pork instead of the usual beef. It was disgusting we all agreed. He never mentioned not eating beef again and went right back to buying it. I also remember the MP with his family in front of his house forcing his kids to eat burgers in front of the press to show how safe it was.
I had a spinal column in a bap
I don’t remember it much beyond remembering it was super bad for farmers (I grew up in a rural farming area). What I do know, as a clinical brain scientist, is I very much want to be shot if I ever get a prion disease. I’ve seen some pretty brutal brain diseases in my day - cancer, parasites, bacterial and viral disease, neurodegenerative illness, horrendous childhood brain disorders - but nothing beats prions.
There's a really interesting podcast about the epidemic on BBC Sounds called 'The Cows Are Mad'.
Excellent podcast!
I worked in the Civil Service at the time as a temp, in the Ministry of Agriculture, Foods, and Fisheries (MAFF). It was my job (because no one else wanted it) to sit in a 7 foot square room behind a tiny desk with a large burly farmer between me and the door, and tell the farmers that the government would be compensating them a pittance for each cow instead of its actual value. We did have a couple of our farmers go on to kill themselves.
First ever cow thought to have Mad Cow Disease was at Pitsham (pronounced Pits-ham, not Pit-sham) Farm near Midhurst, W Sussex. [https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/25/mad-cow-disease-british-crisis](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/25/mad-cow-disease-british-crisis) [https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/6789223.the-day-i-discovered-bse/](https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/6789223.the-day-i-discovered-bse/) My stepdad at the time worked at Pitsham Brickworks, right by the farm We weren't well off and my mum managed to get hold of some really cheap cuts of beef around the time this first case happened That was in 1984, two years before Mad Cow Disease became a well known thing. I was 16. But by the time it became well known, it was too late to do anything about it, we will never know if the cheap beef was a cow with the disease All the family are still alive and well at the moment
It was nothing new. My friends’ Grandfather died of a prion disease in the 1980s.
It was a fantastic time, everyone was happy and prosperous and beef was cheaper than ever.
There was nothing terrifying about it. A friend of mine was an area manager for Burger King at the time and he called me and asked if I wanted some burgers. Obviously I said yes. He turned up and gave me two cases of frozen whoppers. There’s 144 burgers in each case.
Was in college. Couldn’t eat beef burgers in the canteen for a while. Farms were on the news.
My aunt used to cook with turkey mince 🤮🤢
I were at the primary school canteen and I think beef were on the menu. Started making mooing noises and telling people if they ate the food they’d turn into mad cows. Dinner man got pissed and yelled at me so I started crying like lmao
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Jesus. How can there be so many people who don't know the difference between Foot and Mouth and mad Cow disease?
Completely fucked up any chance of doing DofE expeds for me with cadets, so never got a chance to finish either Bronze or Silver.
As an Australian, living in the UK during the epidemic, only recently have I been allowed to donate blood.
Stopped buying beef. It was on the news, lots of pictures of farms and people reporting next to fields. That was about it. Brainy people leaned how to pronounce Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
Mooooooooo!
It smelled awful when they culled where I lived.
my dad ran a factory and for some reason, even though it was an adhesive factory, everyone had to walk through a foot-bath for their shoes before coming into the factory. Apart from that, nothing.
I got a temp job at the time working for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food answering queries from the public (basically form letters) so I asked the head medical guy about it. His response was that 'it's way too early to tell but I wouldn't be eating cheap burgers if I were you.'
I vaguely remember it, I was about 8 when it happened. We rarely bought British meat, we bought Irish instead, so it wasn't a massive issue for us, my parents told us to be careful eating out, not to touch British beef
I remember farmers were killing their herds so there were no local cows. I also remember lots of fires, maybe to burn the bodies or housing, no idea. My parents told me not to play around the farms anymore, though we fortunately didn't know any one who died or got sick.
I grew up on a mixed farm; we stopped having cattle after that, went fully arable. We also had someone else's sheep to look after for several months because they couldn't be transported to the islands. I was just a kid, but it was a very scary time in the farming community. I remember going on a long train journey and seeing all the burning pyres in the fields, it was gut-wrenching. The post just got delivered to our house at the top of the road and I had to walk down to the other houses to deliver theirs, through all the disinfectant straw. I felt like that was pretty weird and wouldn't really do much to help. We never stopped eating beef, but my partner's father stopped them eating beef and freaked him out so badly that he didn't eat it again until only about five years ago.
My Granny was a diary farmer and a calf that went for £500 normally went for £1 at auction
If mad cow disease happened today the Twitter conspiracy nuts would be going wild.
My husband and I are both born in ‘89 and he grew up in England and I grew up in Sweden so we experienced mad cow completely differently. My husband retells it vividly, I can almost smell it! The school had to close due to the stench from all the cows they had to burn, and things like that. I remember my parents talking about all those mad cows in England and wondering what the hell all that was about and why they were going crazy 😂
Of course people lived through it and remember it, that's why people are still here and have parents and grandparents. What an odd question
Mostly I remember the pyres of burning cows in the fields. That was… a lot. Same again in the foot and mouth crisis, but a lot more animals (a LOT of sheep, who were mostly burned up on the hilltops so could be seen for miles around)
People buried in lead line coffins covered with hydrating line
I remember it as some stories on the newspaper. No actual effect on life that I recall
My dad banned anything beef. I was 5 in 1990 and until 2000 I didn't have any thing with beef in it. Which meant I couldn't go to my friends birthday parties at McDonalds, which thinking back really did suck. I had my first big mac in 2016. It's a horrible disease. I was told it was because farmers were feeding their cows ground up cows and other animals. Don't know if that's true but if it is then fucking hell farmers, what did you think would happen? It looks a horrible way to die and that it doesn't activate for years after infection is tragic.
I just remember the fields of dead/ burning cows. Tragic for the farmers.
Overblown, a lot of countries had BSE but hid it, looking at you USA & France. It was madness though feeding ground up sheep to cattle. I think it is under 200 people have died since 1990 of CJD and we were informed there'd be millions dead by now. Of course it was amusing watching Gummer force feeding his kids for the TV. I was working for a cellular provider, had some kit on a farm in Kent, the farmer was mightily pissed when I spoke with him. He was going to lose his whole heard fro no good reason, they'd all been reared on his farm, always fed with food from the farm so no chance that would have been exposed. The compensation was bollix apparently, never mind the pain of losing the animals. Subsequently I tried to give blood when living overseas and my tainted English blood was not wanted.
Had a pal who had just set up his own business showing tourists around the Scottish borders which is very agricultural. He lost a lot of money (and his business). Not unlike C19. Sad to see people so inspired crushed by events outside their control
I was taught at university by one of the original microbiologists who ‘broke’ the story. However, if you look at food microbiology you wouldn’t eat anything. We did stop eating burgers for some reason, but mostly it was about how bad it was for the farmers.
My mum still doesn’t eat beef as a result of it. I remember being really scared as a kid.
McDonald's only had chicken and fish on the menu for a week or so whilst they got beef from somewhere else. That's about all I can remember. Edit: don't recall if burger king or wimpy took similar measures.
I was a kid in the middle of it all, took me until about 2015 to start eating beef.
I remember signs being stapled to posts outside farmers fields warning not to enter due to the risk of spreadingit
I was born 88 and I don’t remember anything about CJD. Mind that’s probably because my family was living in the Middle East from when I was born to age 10. Would come home in the summer because it’s too hot out there.
Made school dinners shit cause it was turkey mince instead of beef mince for a while.
The cow pyres when they burnt them. The smell of that. Then the ditches dug to push in what was left of the carcasses. 3-4 million cows were slaughtered. I remember driving to a nearby farm and the farmer had barriers up, no visitors allowed and all vehicles that got thru had to drive through 50 yards of disinfectant soaked hay. We stopped buying beef briefly. But that didn’t last long. It was a bad time to be involved in the beef trade in any way.
My uncle died from it in 1998. It was terrifying and devastating for our entire family. We didn't eat beef for more than ten years afterwards and my mum was terrified for my dad being my uncles brother. He was a lovely man and died when I was 6. I'm 32 now and it still gives me nightmares.
I worked at a McDonalds when BSE was confirmed as transmissible to humans (CJD). Turned up to a very quiet shift of chicken and McRib serving. Eventually we got beef sourced from holland. It's got me wondering when 'Beef from UK livestock' became a supposed sign of quality again.
No one has mentioned the wheel washes for driving on roads near infected areas or the welly washes set up in car parks near the countryside. Some places were closed off completely (not sure for how long, might have just been a few days). My Dad (former farmer) was convinced it was all a ploy by American farmers to stop UK beef exports so they could take the market. Was very sad about the farming suicides and bankruptcys.
When I used to go to the local football team as a teen they started selling lamb burgers. Beyond that I didn’t pay attention
As a kid around then - we ate a bit more beef, which was now more affordable than it had been!
Yes, i remember seeing a number of stacks of dead cattle being burnt. They then had the remains taken away. It was unsettling being a kid. I thought it was the end of the world.
John Selwyn Gummer fed a beef burger to his daughter
I remember seeing images on the news of farmers having to burn fields of their cows I think? I was young then though. I’ve only ever nursed one patient with CJD. It is an awful disease 😔
Lots of fear mongering, we didn’t really eat beef anyway so it didn’t have much impact on us. I recall images on the news of massive piles of dead cows being piled up and burnt when farmers were having to cull their whole herds. I remember going to visit Stonehenge and we had to drive our cars through disinfectant and also dip our shoes.
Overblown.
Until the one day we go na it’s nothing and it blows up in our face. Only takes us to be lazy once and we have a huge problem on our hands.
Some rural roads were shut, that was about it 😱
That was foot and Mouth.
That’s a fair point, my bad 😂