Colin Whitaker would happily have spent his life as a country vet, caring for farm animals near his home in Kent, and never coming to public notice beyond his local area. But a dogged determination to find answers to puzzling questions raised by his bovine patients catapulted him into the limelight in 1987 after he reported the first documented cases of what became known as mad cow disease, or BSE. He has died aged 83.
The disease became a cause célèbre in veterinary health, with more than 4 million cattle eventually being sent for slaughter. Already a politically explosive issue, it became even more so when in 1996 the first cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans were linked to eating infected meat – but not until more than a year after people had started to die. British beef was banned from export for at least a decade, forcing the agriculture industry to face the disastrous consequences of feeding herbivores such as cattle and sheep on high-protein concentrates containing the rendered carcases of sick animals.
