ABSTRACT
On 20 March 1996, in a televised statement to the House of Commons, Stephen Dorrell, the then Health Secretary, announced that ten cases of a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) had come to light and that the Government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) ‘has concluded that the most likely explanation at present is that these cases are linked to exposure to BSE before the introduction of the specified Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy offal ban in 1989’. This announcement has set in motion one of the most intense and protracted media coverages of any UK public health issue since World War II. No other socioenvironmental hazard, threat to public safety, environmental degradation or pollution, not even the radiation fall-out from Chernobyl has attracted a similar level of attention from the British media.
