Over the past decade, there has been an increasing number of food alerts—bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), dioxin, Listeria, Salmonella—creating a genuine crisis of confidence among consumers in food safety and its governance. Of these food alerts, the BSE one has been the worst, developing the characters of a real emergency.
van Zwanenberg and Millstone's book BSE: risk, science and governance provides a comprehensive analysis of the development of the BSE crisis, tracing its roots back to traditional UK agriculture and food policy‐making. From these premises, the book analyses the course of events from the discovery of the first BSE case in November 1986 to the final failure that brought profound institutional changes in the UK, in the European Union and in several European countries. Particularly, the role of the relationships between science and public policy making in the development of the BSE crisis has been thoroughly analysed. The focus of the book is mainly the various lessons that can be learnt from the BSE saga. The history of BSE is presented as a paradigm of situations that require interaction between science and politics in a framework, where scientific uncertainties predominate.
The book first describes the role of science in public policy making and the different structures and approaches for science‐based policy making after 1945 and up to the publication of the US NRC's Red Book of 1983, which states the paradigm adopted after the BSE crisis by the European Commission and the European Food Safety Authority for their policy‐making process. In the subsequent chapter, the evolution of UK policy making on agriculture and food‐related topics during the past two centuries is described. This chapter provides a basis for understanding the psychology of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries officials that led to the development of the BSE crisis. The next three chapters describe reactions to the detection of the first BSE cases, characterised by the imposition of a policy of secrecy at first, followed by seeking the help of advisory committees (Southwood Working Party, Tyrell Committee and Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee) to try to provide a justification for, and a masquerade to disguise, faulty policy judgements. The last chapters of the book, before the summary and conclusions, are about the BSE policy in continental Europe and the partial reform of food policymaking in the UK, the European Union and some European countries (France and Germany).
The analysis of the BSE policy in continental Europe is less complete and convincing than that carried out on the UK policy. The European reaction to the 1996 crisis, after the first cases of variant Creutzfeld–Jacob disease, is not analysed in all its aspects and consequences. In particular, the book does not deal with the testing of all bovine animals slaughtered for human consumption, adopted in the early 2000s. This was a clear over‐reaction in contrast with the previous period that the authors properly define as “regulatory rigor mortis”. This mass testing, presented to the public as a precautionary decision, an overkill from the scientific viewpoint, as it did not prevent a significant amount of infected animals from entering the human food chains, but was quite an effective way to overcome the attitude of European veterinary officials of overlooking the importance of BSE and to obtain widespread testing of animals in the categories at risk. This is another example of flawed policy decisions based on non‐scientific motivations and concealed under the pretence of science‐based policy making, which has characterised the entire BSE saga.