Meat from cattle infected with a fatal brain disease is being sold in butcher shops and supermarkets.
The Government insists that the brain disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), presents no health hazard to people who eat the meat of infected animals. But the outbreak was made a notifiable disease last week and the heads of infected animals are being sent to the Central Veterinary Laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey.
Senior scientists are understood to have advised the Ministry of Agriculture that the meat could be dangerous and they want it withdrawn from sale immediately. They say privately that ╥Whitehall penny pinching╙ is allowing a potential health hazard to continue.
The scientists fear that the infected cattle have caught the disease from sheepmeat which they have been fed. Livestock are commonly fed the cooked meat of other species.
Professor Richard Southwood, from the Zoology department at Oxford University, said: ╥If the agent has crossed from one species to another there is no reason why it should not cross from cattle to man.
╥It is most unlikely that we will all go mad from eating beef sausages. But it is possible that what we see as scrapie in sheep and BSE in cattle is transmitted to man and manifests itself as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.╙ This is a rare degenerative disorder which is invariably fatal.
A Ministry of Agriculture spokesman said that there was no firm evidence that meat from infected animals posed any health hazard. He said cattle brain was seldom used to make meat products.
