The Great Commercial Non Sequitor.

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, Britain was in the grip of the BSE scare (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, if you think it would help to know.) It became colloquially known as Mad Cow Disease, because cows were behaving like lunatics before being put down to save them further suffering. This raised the obvious question:

‘Is there any danger of humans catching it through eating infected beef?’

Panic flared among the vested interest groups. ‘No,’ said the farmers. ‘No,’ said the meat industry. ‘No,’ said the government and its scientists (we had a Tory government at the time, and farmers generally vote Tory.) And the reason they gave was:

‘There is no evidence that BSE can cross the species barrier from cows to humans, so beef is safe to eat.’

I was a meat eater then, and my first thought was ‘Hang on a bit, this is the classic commercial non sequitor, and a damn dangerous one at that. They’re not saying there’s any proof that the disease can’t cross the species barrier, only that there’s no evidence (yet) that it can. It doesn’t follow that it must be safe to eat beef.’

It was also revealed that cows had caught the disease by eating feed contaminated with scrapie, the ovine form of BSE, so a second question occurred to me. ‘If the disease can cross the species barrier from one mammal (the sheep) to another mammal (the cow,) why can’t it cross to the human being? We’re just another mammal, surely.’

An independent scientist appeared several times on the TV, expressing exactly the same concerns as mine and urging people to leave beef off the plate until the facts were properly established. ‘No,’ said the farmers. ‘No,’ said the meat industry. ‘No,’ said the government and its scientists. ‘There is no evidence etc, etc... It is perfectly safe to eat beef. You must continue eating beef.’ (They began to sound a bit like Daleks.) We even had the disturbing spectacle of a government minister force feeding his young daughter with a beef burger, just to leave us in no doubt.

I was left in doubt, and began exercising caution. A few years later, the PM stood up in parliament and said:

‘Er, sorry about this, but we’ve discovered a new disease in people. It’s called new variant CJD, and it’s been proved to have come from eating infected beef.’

Oh.

They did this with thalidomide, they did it with DDT, and then they did it with BSE. Despite living in a culture becoming so manically obsessed with risk avoidance that it’s virtually illegal to tie your shoe laces without first sitting down, the Establishment is prone to taking a very different view when there’s money involved. Then the message is drummed home hard: ‘Do it, do it, do it until we’ve proved beyond doubt that it’s dangerous.’

Now they’re doing it with mobile phones. I heard it again only the other day: ‘We don’t accept that there’s sufficient evidence to indicate that mobile phone use can be harmful to the brain.’ There’s that classic commercial non sequitor again, and there’s very big money tied up in mobile phones.

If I were a prolific mobile phone user, I would be taking steps to cut down drastically because I would be suspecting that one of these days we’re going to have another ‘Oh’ moment. It’s how these things work.