Mad and Coughing Cows: Bovine Tuberculosis, BSE and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain

Since the 1950s, consumers have come to expect cheap, but safe food. A number of food scares in the 1980s and 90s – E. coli in 1987, Salmonella in 1988, and the furore over GM ingredients – challenged this expectation. Of all these scares Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or ‘mad cow disease’, although coming at the end of a decade of food scares, came to embody the fears that had come to surround issues of food safety.