A far worse threat
Leanda de Lisle
Ihave supped at the village of the damned — and it's making me feel a little queasy. My entire family has eaten meat from butchers in Queniborough linked to the death of five young victims of variant Creuzfeldt Jacob disease. Since the average incubation period for the disease is said to be 20 years, the epidemic may not yet have begun. Meanwhile I have lost interest in cattle executions and depressed shepherds.
The foot-and-mouth epidemic is a tragedy. But there is something worse about a disease that kills, not just lambs, but our own children. Nobody seems to know why vCJD singles out the young for a particularly cruel and horrid death, although I have heard suggestions that the loss of baby teeth would allow infection to enter the bloodstream directly and shorten the incubation period. Last week's scientific report just tells us that old-fashioned butchery techniques, in which knives were used to cut through both brain and meat, and old-fashioned slaughter techniques, in which corpses were wiped down rather than hosed to prevent the meat going sour, are probably to blame for the cluster of vCJD deaths in Queniborough.
These techniques were not exclusive to Leicestershire in the Eighties, but the public seems remarkably unconcerned about the implications of this. It's possible that infected cattle brains do not cause vCJD and that the Queniborough report is barking up the wrong tree. But then according to some scientists it's possible that HIV doesn't cause Aids. I still wouldn't feel happy if I had had a needle full of the stuff plunged into my behind, would you? Perhaps you are more phlegmatic than I am. Perhaps you share my husband's view that you shouldn't worry about what you can't help. Personally, if I could do something about it I wouldn't worry so much. It's having to 'hope for the best' that really gets to me.
Another fatalistic attitude, articulated by my sister-in-law, is that 'one could be run over by a car,' Indeed one could. But now one could be run over by a car, or die horribly from vCJD. Isn't that great? Furthermore, children who before were threatened not only by speeding cars, but the drug culture and other modern threats, are even more likely to succumb to bad spaghetti bolognese than the rest of us. Don't parents have enough to worry about? Sitting here panicking, it's difficult to believe I have spent the last ten years writing about food scare stories and what nonsense they are. Salmonella, listeria —I've had my say on them all. 'Dangerous to babies and old people? Never mind,' I've advised. 'You wouldn't give a baby whisky and cigars, so don't give it Brussels pâté or ripe French cheeses either. As for the old — better to be killed by a good Pisco sour whisked with egg white than choke on a mouthful of health supplements.'
However I am • not alone in suffering from the recent onset of hypochondria. A usually rather tough and brave friend, who had happily chewed on my illegally bought beef on the bone in the Nineties, let out a squawk of horror when I told her she may have eaten beef from Queniborough in the Eighties. 'I'm going to tell my parents that if I get this CJD I want to be shot,' she told me. The irony is that people like myself went out of their way to shop in Queniborough because the butchers there were so good. Nice, traditional, family establishments, a bit more expensive than the supermarkets but worth the money. I still think we should support family butchers, but after reading the Queniborough report my chief feeling is Eeeuw.'
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